“Now Animad,” Celestia said looking up from her paperwork “Please explain to me why exactly I should let Twilight and her friends go with to Draconia to the single most dangerous place on the continent instead of doing the logical thing and let make them stay?”

“We can be quite convincing when we wish to be, Celestia,”

“Animad I am trying to be as polite as possible but there is no way in Tartarus that I would- ”

”Even dead gods dream Solaria,”

Her muscles tensed for but a moment before letting out a reluctant sigh “I’ll get you and the elements and airship to the edge of the Wastes you’ll have to walk from there. If you let them get hurt then so help me I will end you!"

”Equines, always so assured that that the power of friendship can conquer all. Trust me when I say this Celestia there will come a day when that power will not be enough and there will only be you to blame. Now if you will excuse us we have a nationwide paper shortage to prevent,”

“Animad,” Celestia said “What did you do?”

”Your student wasn’t very fond of the idea of letting me talk to you alone and foolishly tried to stop me, but she was suddenly predisposed as someone has seemed to have gotten the idea into her head that there might be a repeating number in pi and she is quite adamant to find this error,”

“How long has she been writing?”

”Ten minutes and 18 seconds so far, so she has used roughly an equivalent of…twelve eighteenths of the Archives weight in paper,”

“And that is…”

”So much paper that your student is currently trying to create a pocket dimension to store it all,”

“But Twilight knows those spells haven’t been properly teste-”

BOOM!

Celestia opened her eyes having expected for her hide to have been peppered with large and potentially fatal shards of debris. Instead everything was frozen in mid blast giving her a clear view of her student a fraction of a second before she would have been completely have been reduced to ash and pleasant memories.

“You would have thought that your prized student would have been smart enough not to use experimental spells to fix minor problems but if Lesson Zero has shown us anything it’s that Twilight clearly has some deep seated issues with failure,”

“Animad! This is far beyond acceptable!” Celestia yelled “First you assault my niece with a boulder then you severly injure two of my guards as well as destroying the market district. But this. This is going too far! You’ve driven my student to the point that she’s about to destroy Canterlot if not the surrounding province! I don’t care what you are but I will not stand idly by and let you treat my subjects like they’re your personal playthings!”

”We’re sorry Celestia but we have…Plans for the bearers and we require your cooperation if we are to bring them to Draconia without arousing their suspicions, but if you are not willing to do so then we’ll have to make a reason for them to go Twilight’s little ‘accident’ will be of more use than you are currently,”

“Animad what your doing is wrong! It does not matter what power you wield, you will fail!”

”Now say that like you believe it,”

With our little conversation over we erased the immediate memory of every pony who would have seen or detected the blast as well as undo the damage caused by Twilight’s latest psychotic break, as far as anyone knew she had simply fallen asleep in a pile of paper while trying to write pi. We left Celestia in her chambers sound asleep thinking that our conversation had been a bad dream when she awoke, it was sad that that it had to end so badly so soon after we had gained her support but we could make do with what we had for the time being.

After all we thought. A rift can be quite useful in the right hands.

With everything in place we decided to in on the medical wards newest patients, Fluttershy and Cadence to be exact. Not surprisingly, Discord and Twilights brother Shining Armor were both present. Shining had clearly not been getting the recommended eight hours of sleep as his bottom eye lids were straining under the weight of the bags beneath them, he have been waiting until the mares would awake. After all ponies have thick skulls that can take a good hit or two. Or was that bison? It was most likely bison, Cadence and Fluttershy might very well never wake up, we then began to ponder what was the maximum amount of force would be required to cause impact induced comas in ponies until we remembered why we were here.

Filing my thoughts on equine skull resilience for later pondering we decided to introduce ourself to the sleep deprived captain. After all his sister and his wife had the pleasure of meeting us so why shouldn’t he?

”Why hello Shining Armour, how are you on this fine morning?”

“Things were going par the course until Cadence got hit by a-Wait am I hearing voices now? How long have I been awake? ”

”You’ve been awake for the last 32 hours, and we are not a figment of your sleep deprived mind, we are Animad and we are the one who hit your wife with a boulder two days ago,”

All semblance of exhaustion vanished from his face at the knowledge we imparted onto him.

“You had the gall to attack my Cady, who is a Princess of the Crystal Empire mind you,”

”You equines have very odd standards for what is considered an empire don’t you? Most would consider it a mere city state if it weren’t an Equestrian protectorate, now if you wanted to see a true empire you would go to Roam, before its collapse of course,”

“Hey! I’m the Prince of the Crystal Empire and I won’t let you insult it!” Shining Armour responded punctuation it with a huff from his nostrils.

“Prince Consort which doesn’t have any inherent power behind it without the existence of the actual monarch in question, without Cadence you would be only the Captain of the Guard, and not a good one at that,”

“Hey, I take offence to that!”

”Only because you know its true,” we retorted.

“If you’re so smart then tell what I’ve been doing wrong then,” Shining Armour said clearly not expecting a response.

We manifested a large whiteboard onto the opposite wall along with a marker.

”We hope your good at taking notes,”

“Shiny, are you still here?” Twilight said as she leaned her head through the door “Princess Celestia wants to meet us in- When did you start writing this?”

Twilight had arrived just in the middle of my lecture where I was pointing out the flaws in his strategies and plans which we continued despite her minor interruption.

”As you can clearly see the shield you place around the city is not a perfect sphere, but rather a layer of solid magical energy spread out between thousands of nodal points, The shield you used had already surpassed the Pressure Point Limit. The point where adding additional points no longer reduces the units of pressure per nodal point of energy,” we said pointing the marker at a diagram of Canterlot with a large bubble over it then pointing to a similar diagram but with a large polygon instead of a sphere ”It would have been just as effective and much more energy efficient to use a medium resolution polygon than a multi-point near perfect sphere as fewer points would have to be generated for the same result, you could then use the left over energy to enhance the shield or create multiple layers of smaller shields beneath it,”

“That actually makes sense” Shining Armour said rubbing his chin in thought. “Oh! Hey Twiliy, your friends been showing me some tricks for my shield spell,”

“Animad? As in the one who assaulted your wife with a boulder?”

”The same wife who survived being thrown from the highest point in the Crystal City State-”

“Empire!” Shining Armour yelled.

”City State, directly at an ancient unicorn king made of shadows? We would be most disappointed if alicorns had some inexplicable weakness to boulders” we replied ”Now what was it you needed to tell us about?”

“Princess Celestia and Luna wanted to see us all about some important business involving Draconia,”

“What about?” Shining Armour asked.

“Something bad from what she’s told me so far,”

”Well we shouldn’t leave her waiting now should we?”

We love when a good plan comes together.

“It would seem that we hath a most odd of scenarios before us elements,” Luna said before an illusion base projection “a large rift of magical origin has been reported in Draconia that may be of some danger to the surrounding area,”

“Wait we’re being called because of some magic hole in the wall in the middle of nowhere?” Rainbow Dash asked “Can’t we just send some of those egghead mages to fix it for us, it’s not like nightmare moon is going to burst out of it or something,”

“If this were just a regular rift then we would have sent the mages guild to deal with the issue,” Celestia explained. “But there’s something odd about this rift not only is it bringing strange creatures into our world but it has been indicated by the Dragon Lords there that the rift is of Equestrian origin,”

“and how exactly are they know that it’s Equestrian?” Twilight asked.

”Magical signatures, the race of the caster and rough location of casting can be estimated by study of its field, but we would have expected the Princess of Friendship to know that,”

“Smartflank,” Twilight muttered beneath her breath.

“No offence dear but we have much more important matter than your ego,” Rarity said gently patting Twilight’s head to soften the blow of her insult. “Now back to business, what are we to do your highness?”

“We are going to send the six of you to investigate the rift as well as maintain relations with the Dragon Lords, we would rather not have another Dragon War on our hands,”

“Woah woah woah, hold it right there! No offense Princess but I don’t see why we should make friends with slave owners,”

“Now ah don’t know much ‘bout dragons but from what I’ve seen they ain’t the nicest of creatures out there,” Applejack said in reply.

“D-did you say we’re meeting dr-dragons? ” Fluttershy asked from across the room.

“Fluttershy? When did you get here?”

“Oh I was here for the last five minutes, I wanted to say something but it looked like you were talking about something important so I just waited here, now what’s this about dragons?”

”I have honestly seen invertebrates with more backbone than you Fluttershy,”

“Hey you want to talk trash then you better be able to back it up buddy,” Rainbow Dash said to the ceiling (honestly why do they keep doing that?). In response we made one of her wings 33% longer than the other and watched as she crashed through the door.

”Now that she is dealt with, we all are going on a little trip to Draconia, and by expedition we mean yet another life threatening crisis that Celestia has put in the hooves of her oh so faithful student instead of solving the problem herself ,”

“Animad, can you for once please be civil,” Rarity said.

”Trust me when us when we say that we have your best interests in min-Fluttershy if you sneak out of that door I will summon the largest mind flayingly horrific arachnid that has ever violated the dreams of mortals, you understand?”

“Y-yes Animad sir,”

”Now then, when do we leave?” we asked already anticipating our departure.

“You will all be leaving by tomorrow as we have been preparing a ship for you just in case a situation like this ever occured,” Celestia replied. “

”That will plenty of time for us to attend the ‘Blueblood has been thrown into an asylum’ party then, I’m going to need a form of some sort,” so we formed a body, it was a simple design, a unicorn of slightly above average height and build with mild a mild grey coat which we thought complimented our white and black mane, and to top it all off we decided on a mark of a star covered by a large eye.

”We recommend living today like it is your last, for it most likely will,” we said to them as we walked out of the door with the air of a stallion that could get away with murder if he so wished.

“That Animad there, sure is chock full of surprises ain’t she girls?”

“mmmhmmm,” I heard them say in agreement.

Oh if only they knew we thought with a chuckle If only they knew.

Author's Note

You know what's fun?
Having to sift through the entire chapter to make sure that only Animad's dialog is in italics.
Fun....