Reforming Spellby terryclothChaptersA Really Bad Idea (or two)Alone in a CrowdLyra 3.0 (now with mirror-soul technology!)If at first you don’t succeed…The Finer Points of NecromancyRedouble your EffortsThe Finer Points of Monster HuntingThe Finer Points of Dragon TamingOver the River and Through the WoodsThrough the Looking GlassFailure to CopeThe Finer Points of Tentacle SexAll’s Well that EndsA Really Bad Idea (or two)I guess you could say that it all started with Spike, like a lot of these stories do. This shouldn’t be that surprising, since he’s one of the most important dragons in my life. We spend so much time together, talking about magic or making out. I really love his backrubs, and his scales, and he loves it when I go off on a tangent about some improbable corollary to a lesser-known magical law. I’m pretty sure he also likes it when I kiss him. He always acts like he’s embarrassed, but he’s never told me to stop. He doesn’t like it when I ask him to eat me, but when I’m lying there on the couch, my tongue sliding against his sharp dragon fangs, while his claws scrape across my skin, under the thin hair on my belly, I just can’t help thinking about it. And sometimes, I can’t help thinking about it some more as I skip through the streets towards the house where Bon Bon and I live, still tingling from his touch, and I can’t help fantasizing about it as I remember just how much being stabbed and gutted and eaten by spiders hurt during my very short time in Luna’s Night Guard. And this time, I decided that I’d put on the magic armor Luna let me take home with me, which usually just gathers dust in the closet, and tap the dragon-eye gem that activates its magic, and wiggle around on the floor as the not-quite-pain of transformation squirms through my body like a million little worms, and then screech hypersonically as I got myself off right there, in the middle of the living room floor. As I was coming back to my senses, I remembered that I had to die in order to change back into a unicorn, and that Luna didn’t like for us to spend a lot of time out in public as a bat pony, and that since it was Sunday, Bon Bon was out at the marketplace selling her candy, and had a date with Rose afterwards, and probably wouldn’t be home until morning. The sensible thing to do – and I was back to my senses, remember? – would have been to lurk about the house, all on my own, with nothing to amuse myself with except for my lyre and all my worldly possessions and a few library books on musical theory and acoustics and Bon Bon’s weird collection of creepy ceramic masks. She’d promised to kill me if I ever touched them, so it would have been the perfect solution. But the less sensible part of me had a different plan. === The glass shattered as I burst in through the library’s skylight, the light glinting off the razor-sharp shards until they evaporated halfway to the floor. Twilight knows Rainbow Dash, and stopped using actual glass in her windows ages ago. The breakaway quasi-matter windows still made a satisfying ‘crash!’ as you burst through them – Rainbow begged her for weeks to put that feature in. It was probably a good thing it wasn’t real glass, since I’d left the armor at home as part of my ruse, and would have gotten some pretty bad cuts breaking through a real window. I’m going to say that I planned it that way, over and over again until that’s how I remember it. Anyway, after my dramatic entrance, I circled around in midair above the library shelves, hissing. Spike looked up from the book he was reading. “Oh, hi Lyra.” “Who is this ‘Lyra’? I am a ninja assassin, here to murder your master!” “Uh huh,” Spike said. “And why would you tell me about your evil plan?” “Because you will assist me, or you will die!” I said, landing on top of a bookshelf, then waggling my wings to keep my balance as it wobbled a few times before settling back into place. “Where is she? So that I might MURDER her!” “Lyra, stop it,” Spike said. “No! You cannot stop me!” I screeched. “I do not fear your vicious claws, or your razor sharp teeth, and I know that you do not dare use your fire here in your own inner sanctum!” Spike pursed his lips, and breathed a narrow line of fire right at me. I squeaked and jumped back into the air, only to see it end about a foot from the shelf. “Well, I do not fear it either, even so! Prepare to defend yourself, or I will use my evil ninja magic on your shattered corpse, and wrest the location of Twilight Sparkle from your mind!” “Did somepony call my name?” Twilight asked, walking into the main room from her little reading nook. “Oh, hi Lyra. What’s with the bat costume?” “I’m not Lyra! Why do you think I’m Lyra?” “Because we can see your cutie mark?” Spike said. “Oh.” I paused for a few seconds to gather my thoughts. “Well, a lyre is a common cutie mark for assassins – the strings are perfect for strangling ponies and dragons with.” “That’s a myth,” Twilight said. “Pony neck muscles are far too strong for the classic garrote as seen in the movies to do much more than leave a nasty welt. Not to mention that if the wire doesn’t have handles on it, you’re going to do more damage to your pastern than to your target.” “Poison!” I said, triumphantly. “You poison the wire.” “Lyra,” Twilight said, letting her wings droop a bit, and her gaze fall to the side. “Come with me up to my room. We need to talk.” “But I wanted to fight your dragon,” I whined. Twilight responded by encasing me in her magical field and holding me frozen in place while she dragged me into her bedroom. I had the feeling this was not going to be nearly as much fun as I’d always imagined. === “You have to stop bothering Spike,” Twilight said, after dumping me onto my back in the middle of her rather impressive bed. It had to have been created by the magic of harmony that created the entire castle, because I couldn’t imagine Princess Twilight Sparkle dropping by the furniture store and asking for a custom made king-sized six-poster bed in the shape of her cutie mark. Then again, the mattress didn’t feel even the slightest bit like it was made out of crystals. I bounced up and down on it a couple times, testing the springs. Maybe it was quasi-matter? “I’m serious, Lyra,” Twilight said. “You have to stop harassing him.” “Wait, what?” I said, replaying what she’d just said. A chill ran down my body. “You don’t want me to see Spike anymore?” “Lyra –“ “You can’t do this, Twilight!” I said, tears forming in my eyes. “He’s one of my best friends! And he loves spending time with me? How could you possibly – mmmph.“ The rest of my plea was cut off as my mouth zipped itself shut. “That’s not what I mean!” Twilight said. “Look, if Spike wants to spend his time dallying with you, then I’m not going to tell him that you’re… well… you. I’m pretty sure he knows you as well as I do.” I snickered, through the zipper. “Better than I do,” Twilight admitted, blushing. “But you have to stop asking him to eat you. I mean, unless you mean it figuratively – I have nothing against cunnilinguis, and with that ridiculous tongue of his it seems like he’d be really good at that sort of thing.” The zipper vanished. “You mean you haven’t tried it out? After all these years?” Twilight sighed. “I’m trying to be serious, here. If you and Spike are going to be an item, then that’s fine. But I can’t have you pestering him to eat you. I care about him, and I don’t want to see him hurt.” “I haven’t been!” I said, flipping onto my hooves. “I haven’t asked him to eat me even once! I mean, in the last few weeks.” “Until now,” she said. “Well, he was supposed to think I was some random assassin,” I said, cringing a bit. “I guess I could have put a bit more effort into my disguise.” “Lyra,” Twilight said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this – and I mean that literally, not sarcastically, because while you’ve shown no sign of noticing anything, I’ve underestimated your perceptiveness too many times to ignore the possibility that you might not be as clueless as you seem…” She trailed off, then picked her train of thought back up off the ground. “Have you noticed that Spike is falling in love with you?” “That’s silly,” I said. “I mean, I know we fool around all the time, but that’s because he’s an adolescent colt and I’m a mare who’s willing to give him the time of day. He doesn’t act all crazy about me like he always did with Rarity.” I waved my hooves around in crazy motions, balancing with a few flaps of my wings, then set them back down on the bed, which bobbed up and down for a while until the springs settled. “Besides, I’m not available for a relationship. Bon Bon and I are just roommates.” Twilight looked like she might have broken something inside her head trying to parse that last bit. “And what if he is?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure that would make him less likely to eat me.” Twilight leaned forwards. “Lyra, Spike defines himself by his helpfulness and loyalty. There is nothing he wouldn’t do for the mare he loves. Nothing.” “Oh,” I said. “And that’s… bad?” I tilted my head. “No matter how much it would hurt him,” she added. “But he’s a dragon!” I said. “He’s allowed to eat ponies. That’s what dragons do!” “Not Spike,” Twilight said, firmly. “Lyra, the last thing we need is for Spike to be pushed closer to his dragon heritage. Dragons who act like dragons can’t live with ponies, and he made his choice long before the two of you started hanging out together. If you love him at all, you’ll stop pushing him into doing something that would only make him hate himself.” My ears flattened, and my wings folded against my sides. I dropped to the bedspread, and sighed. “I believe that your logical syllogism is false, Twilight. I know that he shouldn’t give in, although I think you’re wildly exaggerating the danger of that, but it’s something that I want so much. It’s hard not to ask for my heart’s desire, when it’s sitting there, pressed up against me, his fangs at my throat…” I shivered a bit, my wings fluttering out of sync. “When I heard about Luna’s Night Guard, I thought it might be good for you,” Twilight said. “I thought it might help you get this out of your system.” I took a deep breath. “It helps, but… it’s just a taste. The armor is a huge temptation, and on balance I don’t think it’s making me less interested in this sort of thing at all.” I sighed. “But I was miserable, trying to be her guard full time. It was just so exhausting! So much fighting, so much training… so much Diamond Tiara. Ugh.” Twilight giggled, then put a hoof to her mouth to stifle it. “I’ve been thinking about this,” she said, once she’d gone back to her serious face. “And I have an alternative.” “I’m listening,” I said. “A magical solution to your problem,” she continued. “I’m listening with considerably more trepidation than before, given your track record on solving things with magic,” I said. Then, because I was curious, “What did you have in mind?” “A Reforming Spell,” Twilight said. I froze. “Discord somehow managed to eat every copy in Equestria, but I managed to reconstruct one of them from Ego Whip’s original notes. I haven’t tested it --” “Well, thank Celestia for that,” I said, shocked. “Twilight, those spells were forbidden for a reason!” “They’re not forbidden!” Twilight said. “They’re restricted, and as a Princess of Equestria I can give myself permission to cast restricted spells.” “So because I sometimes tease Spike about doing something that he doesn’t want to do, and doesn’t do, and is never going to do, you’re going to turn me into a zombie?!” My wings were spread aggressively, and I was weighing the chances of escape if I just made a run for it compared to trying to stun Twilight with a hoof to the horn or something before making a run for it. Twilight held up a hoof towards me. "You'll still have free will! You'll be able to do whatever you want! Even better, the parameters of what you'll want to do are guaranteed to be within the acceptable social mores of Equestrian society!" “I’ll be gone, and a completely different pony will be living in my body!” “That’s not true at all!” Twilight said. “You’ll be that completely different pony. That normal, well-adjusted, friendly, happy pony.” “Twilight, you can’t –“ I said, but she’d already explained that she could. “You wouldn’t!” I stopped, breathing heavily, and calmed down a little as I realized that that was true. “You wouldn’t.” “Well, of course not,” she said, smiling. “Not without your permission. You don’t have to give me an answer right now –“ “No,” I said. “You can sleep on it, and think about the alternatives –“ “No,” I said again. “No, Twilight, I’m not going to give you permission to cast a Reforming Spell on me. If there’s one good thing that came out of my time in the Night Guard, it’s that I’m confident that, even if I have strange fantasies sometimes, I’m not a danger to myself or others. Now kill me.” Twilight blinked. “You’re not going to let Spike do it, and Luna doesn’t like me walking around in this body any longer than necessary. That means it’s up to you.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m sure you can make it quick and painless and completely boring.” “Wait,” Twilight said. “So you just want to end the spell that summoned that body from the Shadow Realm? I think I have a spell for that.” She walked over to one of the shelves in her bedroom. “I keep a few books here that have sentimental value, even if they don’t belong in circulation,” she explained, as she scanned a hoof down the row. “Aha, here it is.” I hopped off the bed – it took two hops – and walked over to see what book she’d found. “Legend of the Mirror Pool?” It didn’t mean anything to me at the time – I grew up in Canterlot, and hadn’t heard many of the local Ponyville legends. If I had, I would have run away and let Bon Bon kill me in the morning. Twilight flipped to the back of the book, where a small spell was described. I tried to read it over her shoulder, but she was a much faster reader than I was, and I hadn’t gotten far before she finished and put the book back on the shelf. “Are you ready?” she asked. “Will it hurt?” “There might be some slight discomfort, but no, it shouldn’t hurt,” Twilight replied. I pouted. “Sorry, but I don’t want to encourage you to make a habit of this,” Twilight said, before pointing her horn at me and firing off the spell, quicker than I expected. I felt my body go numb, and float up off the floor… and my legs and wings wouldn’t move, and my mouth wouldn’t even open. It was like I was being filled full of air, overinflated like a rubber balloon. Then I popped, and everything was dark. And cold. And wet. This was not my living room. Alone in a CrowdObviously, my first reaction was to thrash about wildly, trying to figure out which way was up, and ruining any chance of feeling it out by spinning in place and waving my limbs around until I was dizzy. Eventually, I noticed that I hadn’t drowned. I also noticed that I was still a bat pony, since two of the limbs I was flailing around were bat wings. So I chirped. The high-pitched sound echoed through the water, reflecting off a large flat surface beneath me at an angle. In every other direction, there was no return – the water went on forever. Or else whatever the chirp hit was acoustically dead. Echolocation isn’t perfect. So I swam down towards the flat surface, and discovered that it was glowing, slightly. Or rather, that it was the surface of the water, and that I had been completely wrong about which way was up. Something was glowing beyond it, but the water I was in was nearly opaque, so the light didn’t travel far. I tried to break through the smooth, mirror-like surface of the water, but found it a barrier that I couldn’t penetrate. So I pressed myself up against it, instead, to get a better look at whatever was beyond. It was a cave, with glowing mushrooms. To one side, I thought I saw a staircase. I kicked my bat pony form’s cloven hooves against the surface, but they just stopped when they reached it, without even the courtesy of the sort of jarring pain you’re supposed to get when you kick something with all your strength and it doesn’t break. I tried to swim for the edge of the pool, but no matter how far I thought I moved I never got more than halfway towards the edge. I decided that panicking was called for, so I did that for a while. Eventually I got sick of it, so I curled up and cried. When I’d cried myself out, I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t stop being conscious, and lying there not doing anything was not only boring, but threatened to push me back into panic mode. So I ‘woke up’ and tried to think rationally about the situation, and I realized that there were only a few things I hadn’t tried. One of them was to swim deeper into the pool, and see if I could find another exit that was actually an exit and not just a vision of an outside world put there to taunt me. The other was to start composing depressing music about my plight, and keep sane by singing to myself. It occurred to me that I could pretend that I could craft a spell-song to dispel the barrier, which would let me feel like I was being productive while putting off exploring or doing anything else useful indefinitely, since composing music wasn’t exactly a fast process. So, that decided that. I based the song on one of the counter-songs that Twilight had taught me, and tried to adapt it to my current problem. I’ve spent my life pursuing infamy and fame, But I don’t need the ponies calling out my name. The one and only thing That makes my spirit sing Is music. It’s the music. It’s the music in my heart. So I’ll break out, and set myself free! Gonna go home, and brew me some tea… And I can’t think of good words This is getting quite absurd But I’m sure that it’ll make me, um, free as a bird? And that wasn’t even my first attempt. Needless to say, the magical barrier failed to fall before my musical prowess. “Gah! This isn’t working!” I slammed my head against the barrier, or at least I think I did? My eyes were closed, so I might have missed. There was still no sensation of hitting anything. “Do you need some help?” asked the creepiest chorus of slightly-out-of-sync voices in dozens of different pitches that I’ve ever heard, and I’m including the giant spider demon. My eyes shot open, and I froze in terror, like an ice cube bobbing in a punchbowl. I felt cold, slimy tentacles slipping around me, curling around my limbs and torso, but I was too scared to look. Also, suddenly aroused. Go figure. The tentacles seemed to notice, because one of them inched towards my crotch, while the creepiest voice ever asked, “Will this help you relax?” “Probably,” I managed, squeezing my hind legs together and curling the pathetic stump of a bat-pony tail. “That doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea. I’m not sure relaxing is really appropriate, since I don’t know how much danger I’m in. Are you a friendly tentacle demon, or just the sort of monster that plays with its food? Is this world even real? “To us, it’s more real than the world outside the mirror,” the voice replied. “The creatures from beyond the mirror tend to disagree, of course.” “What would happen if I died here?” I asked, as a tentacle slithered around my neck, not squeezing uncomfortably tight, but instead caressing and tickling, like a fairly skilled lover who happened to have tentacles. “We are unsure… death has no place here. If you were torn to pieces, the pieces would survive, and we would absorb them, and add them to our collective.” “Right,” I said. “And, hypothetically speaking, is this something that you usually do to the ponies you catch in your tentacles, after you have your way with them?” The voice laughed. “Most ponies choose to join us without being torn apart.” The tentacle squirmed its way between my legs, wiggling between my thighs as it headed for my slit. “But you are already different, staying by the gate for so long. You should relax, and join us, and together we will sing your song, and perhaps we will escape this world as our true selves, at last.” “That seems like an incredibly bad idea,” I replied, relaxing a little despite myself. It’s hard to hold on to a state of utter terror when somepony is willing to talk to you in a reasonable tone of voice. I bet most of the smarter predators know that trick, but even knowing that it was probably a trick, I couldn’t help but relax. “As in, I find it impossible to believe that anypony would actually agree to it.” The tentacle reached my crotch, and slowly licked its way up the length of my slit, like it was a tongue, and even though I was soaking wet due to being underwater, the cold slick chill of whatever it was that the tentacle was made out of felt wetter than wet. “There is much we can offer, and nothing for you to gain by remaining apart,” the voice replied. “This gate will not let you leave as yourself. Even we are constrained by its enchantment, the fragments of us that are drawn out bound to the whims of the ponies that invoke it.” “I have friends, and they’ll find a way to get me out of here,” I said, as the tentacle pressed its way just inside me and started to explore. “I was sent here by mistake, and if Twilight doesn’t realize that right away, she’s sure to check on me in the morning. I just have to hold out until then… it can’t be long now. I’ve already been here for hours.” “Time has little meaning here,” the voice said, the cold slimy tentacle on my neck slithering its way down the length of my chin, then up the side of my face. I really should have been able to see it, but there was nothing. “Especially here, near the gate. What feels like hours may be days, or seconds.” “Oh,” I said, poking at the invisible tentacle with my tongue, and finding nothing to lick at. “Fuck.” Then my limbs jerked against the restraining tentacles as a bolt of slick ice shot into me, penetrating me and filling me with a bitter chill, spreading from my belly. The voice laughed, as it began to thrust. “We thought you’d never ask.” Lyra 3.0 (now with mirror-soul technology!)The first thing I remembered was the last of my memories washing away as I emerged from the pool. Then, I stared in rapt attention at the pony across from me, the pony that I was copying. It was a mint unicorn, young adult female, well-groomed, with a completely blank look on her face. There was an invisible spark, and I realized that my reason to exist was to do nothing whatsoever. So I stood there, staring blankly, as she was briefly outlined with a pink magical aura and collapsed in a heap. I felt nothing. I still felt nothing as the purple-furred alicorn responsible turned her horn on me next, and cast a series of spells, none of which made me collapse. “Divine contamination?” she muttered, after one of the spells. She lifted a book off the stone floor of the cavern, and held it up next to her where she could refer to it as she cast the same spell again. “That’s just bizarre.” There were a few other results she saw fit to relate aloud – I had a real cutie mark with all the appropriate magic, somehow (she poked at my rump, which gave a pleasurable tingle, but of course I didn’t respond), but no memories whatsoever, aside from the ones I was forming. “Lyra?” she asked. When I didn’t respond right away, she waved a hoof in front of my face. I followed it with my eyes automatically. “Lyra? Are you in there?” I tilted my head slightly. I wasn’t sure how to respond. My purpose was to do nothing. Would responding count as a thing? “Answer me,” the alicorn ordered. “I’m here,” I said. “Are you Lyra? The real Lyra?” “I’m a copy of her,” I said, pointing to the unconscious pony, which seemed to be slowly dissolving, the edges already a bit misty. “How are you feeling?” she asked, and apparently despite my lack of memories, the skill-memory I’d been left with included idioms, since I understood what she meant by the question. So I responded, “I don’t feel anything.” “You’re not afraid because you lost your memory?” she asked. “You’re not curious about who you are?” “I don’t feel anything,” I confirmed. “This doesn’t make any sense!” She pointed a hoof at me. “You don’t make any sense! Pinkie’s clones at least had a personality!” “My purpose is to help her do nothing,” I explained. We went back and forth like that for a while, and then she started casting more spells. I’m going to skip ahead to the first thing I felt, which was curiosity at the intricate magic worming its way through my head, and fear that it was going to change me into something that couldn’t fulfil my purpose. Then fear that the fear meant that I already wasn’t fulfilling my purpose. Then, I suddenly had the urge to play the lyre, which terrified me because it just came out of nowhere. “What are you doing?” I asked, during a break where the alicorn sat down on the stone, gingerly poking at her horn as it slowly cooled off. “Oh, Celestia,” she said. “Casting un-optimized spells is exhausting.” “What are you doing to me?” I asked her again. “What did you do to me? Why am I even asking you these questions?” “Good, good,” she said. “You’re scared, and curious. Don’t worry, I’m almost done reconstructing your personality. This isn’t really the intended use for a Reforming Spell, but it is a straightforward application.” She paused. “Actually, if you want I could stop now. You have enough of a personality to be a full pony. The things I’d be leaving out aren’t really… they’re not really that important.” She didn’t seem entirely sincere. I narrowed my eyes at her, suspiciously. “Fine, fine, I’ll give you back your stupid obsessions,” she said, clambering to her feet. “You’d notice if I left them out after I gave you back your memories, anyway.” There was more pink light, and another squirmy sensation running through my head, and for a second, I wanted to kill her. Whatever she was doing to me was really unpleasant, and I hadn’t even been able to understand the concept of something being unpleasant until she’d done it. I wanted to pin her in place, and make squirmy little tendrils of magic slither through her head until it exploded! I wanted to pull off all her legs and wings and hit her with them until they shattered! I wanted to shave her bare and cover her with something really itchy. Of course, before she’d started, she’d restrained me by tying all four hooves together, and cast some weird spell on my horn that kept me from using any magic, so I couldn’t do any of that. I grudgingly admired her methodical dedication to safety, although it would have been more impressive if she didn’t keep using those cheat-sheets to make sure she didn’t forget anything. I struggled against my bonds for a while, gleefully ignoring her demand that I stay still and stop wiggling, until she touched her horn to mine, and I suddenly remembered everything. Well, not everything. Just everything that I ever knew, in perfect clarity. It was kind of disturbing. “Did that work?” Twilight asked. “Lyra? Are you with me?” “What did you just do?” I asked, trying to sort out which memories were recent and which were distant. The only ones I could be sure of were the ones of being there in the cave, not remembering anything, because they were fresh. “Everything’s… out of order.” Twilight frowned. “I couldn’t use a standard memory spell since your head was completely empty, so I took a memory we had in common, used the law of contagion to expand the scope from that one memory to every Lyra-flavored memory in existence, and then pruned out all the memories that weren’t from your point of view. Did it work? Can you remember everything?” She paused. “Can you remember anything that you didn’t do?” “Would I know if I didn’t remember everything?” I asked, trying to randomly remember things, which is harder than it sounds. I remembered having sex with Bon Bon, and having sex with Cloud Kicker, and making out with Spike, and then as hard as I tried I couldn’t actually think about anything other than sex, until I got frustrated and thought about oranges. Wow, when was the last time I’d had an orange? “Wait,” I said, “am I a changeling?” “No?” “Because I remember being a changeling. Oh, wow,” I said, as a scene played out in my mind’s eye. “I remember being, like, three changelings. At the same time. Talking to each other.” I remembered what I’d been thinking, as I carefully showed only a friendly smile to my fellow infiltrators. “They really don’t like each other much.” “I guess I should have expected that,” Twilight said. "I know! When your whole life revolves around being a horrible pony, you have to know that you’re a horrible pony, and so is everyone you know. I wouldn’t like me if I was a lovesucking vampire, either,” I said, with a firm nod. Twilight laughed. “No, I mean that it accidentally gathered extra memories from ponies who only looked like you. I had to come up with the spell on the spot, and those never work quite right.” “I remember being a night guard, though?” I asked. “I don’t look anything like myself as a night guard.” “It goes by your cutie mark,” Twilight explained. “Changelings copy those, too.” I nodded. “And so does the mirror pool.” “Speaking of the mirror pool,” Twilight said, leaning forwards eagerly. “How much do you remember about being a part of it?” “Not much,” I admitted. “It seems to wipe our memories when we emerge. I do remember being Lyra, inside it, though…” I paused, considering how much detail I should go into. “How do you feel about tentacle sex?” Twilight stared at me. “What?” “You were conscious inside the pool?” she asked. “As far as I know, I still am,” I said. It wasn’t like I was the real Lyra. “Just… stay there,” Twilight said, backing away. “Don’t touch anything. Don’t do anything! Just wait here and I’m going to go and read a few books and I’ll be right back as soon as I figure out how to… as soon as I figure something out.” She vanished in a pink flash, teleporting away. Then teleported back a few second later. “And don’t touch anything!” BAMF! She vanished again. I sat there for a little while, looking around at all the papers and stuff scattered around the cave. After a bit, I started reading over one of the spell scrolls she’d left behind. I knew that she’d told me not to do anything, but if she really meant it she wouldn’t have left me all alone with her notes. If at first you don’t succeed…The first thing I remembered was the last of my memories washing away as I emerged from the pool. Then, I stared in rapt attention at the pony across from me, the pony that I was copying. It was a mint unicorn, young adult female, well-groomed, with a nervous look on her face. There was an invisible spark, and I realized that my reason to exist was to help her with some sort of magical project, which was going to be hard because I didn’t remember the fourth thing about magic. The first thing is that it’s glowy. I knew a couple more things, too, like telekinesis and light. I lit my horn up to better illuminate the dim cavern, and could see a crumbling staircase off in the corner leading up into darkness, and a shimmering mirror pool beside me. “Magic?” I asked. “I don’t suppose you’re the real Lyra,” the pony in front of me said, lighting her horn up as well. “Am I supposed to be the real Lyra?” I asked. “I could explain, but I’d rather just cast the spell,” she said, leaning forwards and letting our horns touch. Faint glimmers of understanding started to dawn in my mind, and they intensified as the other unicorn strained to put more power into her spell. My head swam as I tried to make sense of them. Suddenly, there was an epiphany, and everything fell into place. She collapsed, exhausted. My head ached sympathetically, since I remembered casting the spell on myself, and I’d really had to dig into my reserves to get off a spell that powerful. Normal memory spells were pretty easy – for me, I mean. They’re tricky, but a sufficiently talented foal could cast them. Twilight’s variant was still complicated, but also insanely unoptimized. It gathered up a hundred times as many memories as it needed, then used even more power to throw away the extras. Also, it was pretty terrifying, since there was nothing in the spell that required the memory filter and the target of the spell to be the same. Yes, cast as written it would give somepony back their own memories (for the most part), but with a trivial alteration it would give anypony anypony else’s that they or the caster had ever met. And it was only the second scariest spell that Twilight had cast on me – well, on her. “Are you going to do the Reforming Spell next? I thought you were supposed to do it first.” She laughed. “No, I don’t think so. If you’re the real Lyra I don’t need to, and if you’re not I don’t care.” “What would make me the real Lyra?” “It’s pretty simple,” she replied. “The real Lyra was trapped in the pool. Is she still trapped? Did she see the gate activating in time to get to it ahead of the demon?” My ears flattened. “Not exactly. I was discussing philosophy with the demon.” “Huh. I expected more sex.” “I was discussing philosophy with the demon while having sex, yes,” I admitted. “I thought the sex went without saying.” “I didn’t know I was such a prude,” she said, frowning. “I can understand if I was Applejack or somepony that I didn’t want to embarrass, but you have to know that I wouldn’t mind you going into all the juicy details.” “Obviously, I’m no more the real Lyra than you are,” I said. “Euurgh! I tried not to think about sex, and now all I can think about is sex! Make it stop!” So many memories of sex! With so many ponies! What was wrong with me? “Remember your time in the Night Guard?” she suggested. My stomach lurched, as I remembered the feeling of sinking a spear into a living creature. Why had I been fascinated with that kind of thing? What was wrong with me? “I’m going to be sick.” “Do you want me to kill you?” she asked. “I’ve just got this itch to kill somepony, ever since Twilight cast that Reforming Spell, and you’re here, and obviously not feeling good about having my memories.” “What?” I asked. She levitated a thick canvas belt. “I could strangle you. It’d be nice and clean – hardly any blood at all!” I backed away, towards the stairs. “No! I’m here to help you with magic! You were supposed to have me help you with magic!” “Yeah… that was the frame of mind I was in when I summoned you. But now I want a murder victim. Come on… you know you want to help me. It’s your whole reason for existing!” There was a twinge. She kind of had a point. But – no. Encouraging her worst tendencies was not helping! “You’re sick,” I said. “I’ll help you by casting a Reforming Spell.” She laughed, and I continued to back off as she approached. “First of all, there’s no way that you could cast a Reforming Spell. We don’t have enough magic. Second…” A belt wrapped around my throat from behind, and started to squeeze. I kicked and bucked, thrashing around wildly, and managed to break loose. “You’re insane!” I said, as I ran for the stairs. “I’m not insane! You’re just, you know. Expendable. Fake.” She wasn’t rushing, and when I got to the top of the stairs, I could see why – they were blocked by a giant boulder, far too large for a relatively weak unicorn like myself to lift. The only way in or out was to teleport. “Please don’t kill me,” I said, curling up to guard my neck, and trying to look helpless and pitiful. It had worked on me before. “Yeah…” she said, walking up the stairs and stopping near me. “Sorry. This time I am feeling it.” There was a shove, and a brief falling sensation, and then so much pain as I hit the ground – pain, and terror, as I flashed back to the wedding, and the time I’d been tricked into jumping off a cliff. To the hours spent in agony, slowly dying. Not again. Not again! Luckily, this time I’d managed to puncture my lungs when I shattered my ribcage, so I choked to death on my own blood pretty quickly. The other Lyra stared into my eyes as the world faded away, licking her lips eagerly. The Finer Points of NecromancyOr is it necrophilia? I can never keep those straight. At any rate, I’d just watched myself die, and I was so turned on you couldn’t even believe it. I took her head in my hooves and kissed her, full on the mouth… it really wasn’t a very good kiss. There’s a reason people take living lovers. I rolled her over, and Nightmare’s Teeth, she was a mess – she’d burst open, and there were blood and organs everywhere. I spread her legs and hoofed at her sex, massaging it until it started leaking blood. I leaned down and licked at her, squirming my tongue over her still-warm flesh. I reached up and tangled my hoof in a loop of her intestines, and then pulled a whole mess of them out of her belly and onto mine, as I leaned back until I was lying on the ground next to her, squirming in ecstasy as I rubbed her slick, dripping organs all through my fur. I imagined that I was the one who’d died, and that these were my own organs spread out in a messy heap, as the dragon who’d just disemboweled me loomed over me with dripping fangs… Eventually, she started to get sticky, and cold, and I shoved her body off in a corner and used a cleaning spell to wash off my fur. No sense getting blood in the mirror pool. Redouble your Efforts“Get back!” my next incarnation shouted, as soon as she had her memories back. I laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. “Urge satisfied! And then some! You know I’m telling the truth, right? You have all my memories.” “You’re sick! What you did to her corpse! How could you even –“ I licked my lips. “Look. I called you up so that we could start a large-scale project. We make a whole bunch of clones, and then the Lyra inside the pool will be sure to notice that something’s going on with the gate, no matter how much the demon tries to distract her. Then we go get Twilight, and she sends you and the other clones back to the pool. No need for anypony to die.” “But we’re trapped in here,” she said. “By that rock.” “A dozen of us should be enough to move it,” I said. Apparently, she was too disoriented by absorbing a lifetime’s worth of memories to remember the entire plan. “Look, we could go back and forth arguing, but you know that you’re going to help me. This is a magical project, and you were created to help me with magical projects. It’s even ethical, so there’s no wiggle-room this time.” She scowled, then turned towards the pool. “Fine,” she spat. “But I just want you to know that you’re a horrible pony.” “It’s not my fault,” I said. “Twilight cast a Reforming Spell on me. I can’t be anything but what she modeled. So no matter what I do, it’s all her fault. What do you think – mass murder spree?” “No!” “I was just kidding,” I said, turning towards the pool. “We can’t go killing real ponies. That’d be…” I took a deep breath. “Wrong. That would be wrong.” Not sexy. Not fun. She didn’t even look at me, but her ears were flat. “Okay,” I said. “On three. Into her own reflection she stared…” So, to make a long story short, we made up about thirty clones, and then waited a little while, and made a thirty-whatever’th. She was the only one out of all of them that got the memory spell. Because for Celestia’s sake, that horrible spell was still a foal of a nag to cast. “Did it work?” I asked. “Did she see the gate in action? Are you…” She shook her head. “She saw it, but the demon wouldn’t let her get close. She knows what she has to do now, at least. They were in the middle of a big argument when you cast the memory spell.” “So… what?” I asked. “She’s going to talk the demon into letting her go?” The last copy smirked. “She was going to sing.” I had to laugh – yeah, that would probably work. Still, while I knew some pretty annoying songs, the demon was an ageless menace, and time didn’t really work the same way inside the pool as out of it. It would take a while to work, and we decided not to just sit around and wait. We’d go get Twilight to send the clones back, using the spell that wouldn’t kill them, and then tomorrow I’d come back and see if the demon was ready to give in and let her go. With thirty of us, it was child’s play to move the boulder aside. That left me and a gaggle of nearly-mindless clones in the middle of the Everfree Forest. At night. I think you can guess where this is heading. No, no, we weren’t all eaten by Manticores! The Finer Points of Monster HuntingSome of us were. The Manticores are one of the less territorial predators in the Everfree, so they tend to cast a wide net when they go out hunting. But the first monster to find us, as our less-than-stealthy group tried to figure out where we were and which way we were heading, was a Timberwolf. “Oh wow,” said the nearest clone, staring at the Timberwolf in fascination instead of doing something useful, like screaming ‘Timberwolf’. “Get a look at this magical construct! I’ve never seen anything like it!” It growled. Several other clones took that as an invitation to get closer and start poking at it with their hooves. “Is the green stuff nature energy?” one of them asked. “Eww, it stinks,” said a third, scrunching up her nose. There was a snap, and a crunch, and her headless body collapsed to the ground, blood pouring from the mangled remains of her neck. “Ahh! I’m sorry! You smell really nice, honest!” said the first clone, staring at the Timberwolf in horror. It raised its bloody muzzle, and howled. This was the point when the three of us who had memories, and were therefore in charge of leading the pack, stopped arguing about which way was north and noticed that there was a huge freaking Timberwolf about to eat us. “Run! Run, you idiots!” said Number Two, taking her own advice. I was right on her tail, with Thirty close behind me. Answering howls came from all directions, as our little Lyra herd raced off into the darkness. I do have the memories of the three other clones that the Timberwolves got, but it was dark and everypony was confused, and they all died pretty quickly. Timberwolves are quick, you have to give them that. One of them got grabbed by her hind leg, which shattered and twisted out of joint as the Timberwolf swung her around in the air by it. It let go at the top of the arc, and she lost consciousness as soon as she hit the tree. But, anyway, most of us got away, somehow. Maybe they stopped to play with the bodies, once they’d killed a few of us? All we really knew was that we ran for a while, getting even more lost, and then did a headcount and found that there were twenty eight of us left. “You wanted this to happen!” said Number Two, pointing her hoof at me. “You wanted us to get eaten by monsters, so that you could cast the spell on yourself and remember getting eaten by monsters!” “You know that’s not true!” I said. “Although… now that you mention it…” “We don’t know what happens when a clone dies by violence,” Thirty said. “We should try to save as many of them as we can.” “And ourselves,” Number Two added. “Okay, okay,” I said. “No more monsters.” That was when the Manticore attacked. It landed right in the middle of the herd, crushing two clones under its paws, pinning them down as they squirmed in uncomprehending agony with shattered legs and huge gashes torn in their backs. Before they could even scream, all other noise was drowned out by the creature’s terrifying roar! “Manticore!” Number Two squeaked, “Run!” “No, wait,” I said, as I noticed that none of the mindless clones had retreated. “Look –“ Thirty had taken a few steps after Number Two, but stopped and turned back, and we watched the clones circle around the Manticore, calling it names and scolding it for hurting their friends. “Bad kitty!” one of them shouted, bucking it in the side. “Get off them!” another cried, charging at it with her horn. The Manticore’s stinger plunged down reflexively, and she spasmed and collapsed at its feet, writhing in pain and contorting as all her muscles started to lock up. So, yeah, it put up a fight. A clone was gutted with one swipe of its paw, another flung back against a tree by a wing, a third had her head caught in its jaw, and died as it shook her back and forth until her neck shattered. Two more were stung, and joined their herdmate on the ground, slowly dying from the poison. But there were too many of them, and even unicorn ponies have a pretty strong kick. And our horn isn’t just for show! Right, or magic. It’s not just for show and/or magic. You can stab Manticores with it. I don’t think the Manticore was actually close to losing the fight, but the fearlessness of the clones was just too much for it, and the poor thing was spooked. It flew off, nursing a few bruises and puncture wounds, and the surviving clones shouted insults after it, and shot a few bolts of unfocused magic that it probably wouldn’t have noticed even if they’d hit. I took a quick count, once they’d calmed down. Eighteen unhurt, and three more that would probably live, although they’d taken a hit. “We need to keep moving,” I said. “Are you good to travel?” Two of them nodded, but the third shook her head. “My ankle hurts every time I take a step.” “I’ll carry you,” Thirty offered. “No,” I said. “We need to get out of here as quickly as possible, and we can’t have injured or burdened Lyras slowing down the whole group.” The limping clone nodded. “Okay. I’ll follow as fast as I can.” “Oh,” I said, frowning. “Yeah, that would work. I was going to suggest putting you out of your misery but I guess a sprained ankle isn’t really that bad.” “You could finish off the ones who were poisoned,” Thirty suggested. “I think they’re still technically alive.” One of them was, and in total agony. I lined up my horn carefully, and stabbed her in the eye. At first it just popped the eyeball and ground against the socket, but I set my hooves and thrust forwards, and felt bone crack around it as it penetrated her brain. She jerked, and went still. Later, when I got her memory – yeah, she’d been wishing for death. But my horn got stuck, and it was an awkward couple of minutes until Thirty managed to organize the clones to combine their magic and pull me loose. I crushed the skulls of the other two poisoned ponies with my hooves, even though I was pretty sure they were already dead. It turns out that when you’re frustrated and apparently addicted to murder, crushing the skull of a corpse is still pretty satisfying. So we moved on. We lost two to a cockatrice. I just – I don’t even – how could those clones be so stupid? Yes, yes, I should have their memories, let me think. Right. One of them got stoned because she didn’t know any better, and a second joined her because she thought it looked fun. The good news is, they stopped being conscious once they were turned to stone, so at least they weren’t suffering, and we managed to herd the rest away from the budding statue garden before anypony else looked in the creature’s eyes. The bad news is that it wasn’t fun at all – being petrified is apparently pretty painful. We lost one more to some sort of plant-thing. The vines just came down from the tree and snatched her, and she was gone before anypony could really react. In case the message here isn’t getting across, let me be perfectly clear – do not under any circumstances go into the Everfree Forest at night. That place is a Celestia-forsaken death trap! Well, okay, that clone didn’t actually die right away. As of the time I had the memory spell cast on me, she was still alive, just drugged silly and being slowly digested by the plant, which she’d decided she was in love with. There were little roots digging into her flesh in dozens of places, but she was so hopped up on plant venom that it actually felt good. You know – the next time Bonnie’s out of town, I might go see if I can find that plant, with the Night Guard armor on so that I don’t stay dead. It’s not suicide if you don’t stay dead! The Finer Points of Dragon TamingSo, we had seventeen mindless clones left, plus myself and Thirty, when we ran into the stupid dragons. Yes, those stupid dragons. The teenagers who’d been haunting the forest near Ponyville, until Pip and his posse supposedly drove them off. “You again?” asked the big red one. “What are you doing here?” “You again?” I said, taking a step back. “I thought Pip chased you away!” “We’re nowhere near your stupid pony village!” he protested. “You ponies don’t own the whole forest!” “So we’re heading the wrong way,” Thirty said. “Heh. Heh heh,” the dragon said, grinning. “No, I think this is the way you should have come. After all, it’s not often we have ponies inviting themselves over for dinner.” “Um…” one of the clones asked. “Should we run?” “Do you know the way back to Ponyville?” I asked. “Why do you care?” the dragon asked. “You’re never going to make it back there.” “Look, let’s be reasonable,” I said. “If you try to chase us, you’ll catch, what – one pony each? Maybe two? I can offer you something better than that.” I turned to the clones, and waved my hoof to indicate the small herd. “All you can eat!” “You have no idea how much a dragon can eat, do you,” he said, grinning. I actually had a pretty good idea, from previous experience, and talking to Spike. They could eat a lot. Between the three of them, they’d polished off a pony-sized lump of taffy like it was nothing, the last time I’d run into them. “Well, let’s make a game out of it,” I said. “You and your friends chase down these ponies, one at a time, while Thirty and I convince the rest of them to stay here and play by the rules. If you can eat them all, and you’re still hungry… well, you get the two of us. Otherwise, you show us the way back to Ponyville.” “I don’t think I like this game,” said one of the clones. “It’ll be fun!” I said. “You can go first.” “What?” she backed up, looking scared. “The next pony to complain about the game goes second,” I said, to the rest of the clones. “Hah,” said the teenaged dragon. “Fume! Clump! Wake up! It’s dinner time!” The last bit in a cute little sing-song voice. The first pony went to Garble. That’s the red one. I don’t remember when I learned his name; I think one of his friends said it at some point. Anyway, Garble leapt after her as soon as she started to run, and she didn’t even get out of sight of the others before he landed on her back and took her down. He sank his teeth into her neck, and she squealed briefly, and that was it. He held her down for a few more seconds while the body shook in its death throes, then stood up. “Next?” “Uh uh uh!” I said. “You’ve got to eat her, or the game’s over, and we win.” “Oh, right,” he said, laughing and kneeling down over the corpse. “Dinnertime!” The other clones watched in horror as he ate their herdmate, bones and all. It didn’t take long – he was methodical, and apparently really, really hungry. I’m not even going to pretend to know where the bulk of an entire pony body went once it was in his stomach – dragons are just magic like that. Every slurp, every wet tear, every snap of a bone, was like a lover’s caress. After he was done, I felt Thirty forcefully pull my tail down to cover myself. “You’re… dripping,” she said. I blushed and sat down quickly, squirming against the cold rock as it pressed into my nethers. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s okay, I remember what it’s like,” she said. “I’m kind of jealous that I didn’t get it. To me this is just…” she sighed and shook her head. “Necessary.” “Convenient, at least,” I said. “Don’t worry, dragons go right to sleep once they’re full. If they actually follow through on their side of the deal, that’s just a bonus.” The second clone – she’d been the first to whimper as we watched the first get eaten – went to Fume. That’s the purple one with an overbite. She managed to dodge his attack, and turned and reared up, kicking him in the face with a forehoof. The other dragons laughed as he recoiled, and she kicked him again. “Stop it!” he hissed, swiping with a claw and spinning her to the ground, her blood arcing across the nearby trees. She tried to stand up, but he pinned her down with a foot, digging his claws into the small of her back, and then took one of her forelegs in his hand and just ripped it off. It took him several tries. At least she bled out before he finished eating it, and didn’t have to suffer any more after that. He was a pretty messy eater. “I really don’t like this game,” said one of the remaining clones. “It’s the best way to get most of us home,” I said with a sigh, then smiled at her. “Thanks for volunteering!” “What? No!” The third dragon – the big brown one, Clump – lumbered towards her. She danced back out of range. He continued to slowly advance on her. She panicked, and turned to run. He opened his mouth, and spat a ball of sticky flaming goop, that splattered across her hindquarters. She shrieked and ran off in a total panic, and Clump continued to follow her, tracking her by the trail of smoke. He came back a few minutes later, licking his lips. “Got her,” he said. “So,” I said. “You boys full yet?” Garble laughed. “Not even close.” Fume was the first to drop out, after only three ponies. “Sorry, boss,” he said, as he picked at the messy remains of the third pony – some offal he’d left for last, and her skull and ribcage. “I haven’t been this full in, like, ever.” “We’re not done yet,” Garble said. “Clump, you’ve still got some in you, right?” The brown dragon smiled, and patted his tummy, then motioned to the clones for one of them to volunteer to fill it next. By this point they’d gotten wise, and all of them stayed quiet. “Okay, we’ll use the alternate method to pick,” I said. “Eenie Meenie Minie Moe…” Garble managed to wolf down five ponies before he was too stuffed to move. “Fuck. Me,” he said, collapsing next to the half-eaten corpse of the fifth. I really, really wanted to take him up on it, but Thirty gave me a look. “It’s up to you, Clump,” I said. “There’s still five ponies left. Think you can eat them all?” He nodded. But when I picked the next volunteer, he just sat there as she ran off. He let out a loud burp, and struggled to get to his feet, then collapsed. “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” I said with a smirk. “Okay, boys, time to pay up.” Clump reached out and grabbed one of the clones, who hadn’t been picked, by the leg. “Hey! Let her go!” I said, as she struggled and kicked at him. He ignored both of us, pulling her into a tight embrace, and just held her to his chest as he ate her alive, starting from her head. She, um. She wasn’t actually alive for most of it. I mean, he was chewing. “See? He’s still hungry,” Garble said, grinning. “He’s insatiable. You might as well give up now.” “He’s too full to even move!” I said. “If he can’t catch them, then he’s done. Pay up! Tell us how we get back to Ponyville!” Garble laughed. “Fine, fine, I’ll tell you. If… you give me a kiss.” Fume and Clump laughed as he made kissy faces at me. Thirty grabbed my tail as I rose to go take him up on his offer. “Don’t!” she said around the tail-hairs. “Ith a twap!” “But Thiiiirty!” She blinked. “Who?” I whipped my tail out of her reach while she was confused. “That’s my name for you!” I said, as I carefully circled around Clump, not wanting to become his next meal by getting in arm’s reach. “I’m Lyra One, the one who ran off is Number Two, and you’re Thirty. I think it should have been Thirty Three, technically,” I said, pushing my way past the three clones left in the clearing. “But who’s counting? Maybe it’s a nickname.” Then I was at Garble’s side, as he lay in the dirt, stuffed to the gills. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Thirty wince as I leaned down to put my muzzle in reach of his jaws. He grinned at me, and his hand shot up and grabbed the back of my head. My heart raced. I let him pull me forwards… and we kissed. His claws combed through my mane as he tightened his grip on it, and my tongue slipped past his lips to lick over his giant fangs. They tasted like blood. Some of it was mine, since they were pretty sharp. Then his teeth opened a crack, and his tongue slipped into my mouth. I moaned as it squirmed around inside me, and then I was rolling him over onto his back, and straddling him, running my hooves over his scales as we continued to kiss. He was the one who broke it off, pulling his head back and panting. “Fuck me,” he said. “You are one crazy pony.” “I want to kill you,” I told him, breathlessly, my hooves sliding up to the thick muscles of his neck, taut under his scales. “I would orgasm so hard if I could just feel you die beneath my hooves,” I panted. “You nightmare-spawned monster.” “Good luck with that,” he said, running his claws gently down my back. I moaned, and threw my head back, grinding my belly against his. I felt something emerge beneath me – something long and hard and warm, and covered in little flexible spikes. His penis. I’m talking about his penis. Oh, sorry. You looked like you were a little confused. Sorry! Yes, I know you know what a penis is! And yes, that was when I banged a dragon. He was nearly comatose and I was on top. I managed to slip him inside me easily enough, but the spikes sort of dug in when I tried to pull up, so all I could really do was tug on him, then flop myself down and drive him a little deeper with each thrust. He wasn’t really up to screwing me properly – I had to do most of the work – but I didn’t care. I had a dragon cock inside me. And when I couldn’t take anymore, and exploded in pleasure, he ran his claws down my sides, just hard enough to feel really, really good in the middle of an orgasm. I had to work at him a little longer to get him to get off, but there was no way I was getting off him before that. Those stupid spikes, you know? Garble fell asleep afterwards, but Fume pointed us in the right direction. I think he wasn’t sure whether or not he was supposed to double-cross us, and with both his friends incapacitated he decided to play it safe. Or maybe he’s actually an honorable drake. …yeah, he was probably just confused. Over the River and Through the WoodsBy that point, the sun was rising, and it was like night and day. Most of the more dangerous predators went to sleep during the day, and the ridiculously murderous plants were all brightly colored and visible. I still wouldn’t let your foals wander around in it, but the Everfree Forest during the day is… manageable. We met up with the clone who’d escaped from Clump, and even caught up to the one who’d sprained her ankle, since we were heading back the way we’d come. After half an hour, we reached the river, and from there it was just a matter of following it downstream until we got to Froggy Bottom Bog. There was supposed to be a hydra living there, but we didn’t run into it. Number Two and Twilight Sparkle caught up to us in one of the open fields outside the forest, before we got to town. Twilight scrunched her nose up a bit as she looked at the seven of us. “Where are the rest of the clones?” she asked. “Dead,” Thirty said. “This was as many as we could save.” Twilight stepped forwards and slapped her, hard. “You idiots! What were you thinking travelling through the Everfree Forest at night!” “We were thinking that the mirror pool couldn’t be that far from Ponyville, if you had to put a giant rock on top of it to keep ponies out,” I said. “But it turns out that it takes a really, really long time to find Ponyville if you walk in the opposite direction.” Twilight turned to look at me, and sniffed. “And why do you smell like dragon semen?” I raised an eyebrow, and grinned. “Do you really want me to answer that?” “But – what about you and Spike?” “Spike’s Lyra’s,” I said. “I’m not Lyra. But I’ll get you Lyra back. Soon.” Thirty started to explain. “We made a bunch of clones so that –“ Twilight interrupted. “I know, the other Lyra filled me in on the details. You’re sure that the next clone from the pool will be the real Lyra?” “Well… no?” I said. “There’s no way to be sure... but I think she can pull it off.” Twilight nodded. “And the rest of you are ready to go back to the pool?” “Oh yes, please!” said one of the clones. “I don’t want to get eaten by a monster! It really doesn’t seem fun at all!” It only took a few seconds for Twilight to zap the mindless clones. When she turned her horn on me, I held up a hoof. “Wait!” I said. “Not me! You need me to make the clone that the real Lyra will be in!” “No, do it,” Number Two said. “Zap her. You can clone any of us, and she’s a complete psychopath.” “It’s not my fault!” I said. “I’m only what you made me, Twilight.” “I made you as close to Lyra as I could,” Twilight said, keeping her horn charged. “From what your duplicate said, that was a terrible mistake. Lyra may have been a little obsessed with death and dragons, but she was never a murderer!” “Yes! Lyra isn’t a murderer!” I shouted. I knew that I probably should have been making excuses and trying to de-escalate the situation, but I was just so tired and angry and I didn’t think that anything I said was going to make any difference in what Twilight did since she’d already decided I was a villain. “So if I am, it’s all your fault! You and your stupid Reforming Spell!” She tried to zap me, at that point, but I saw the slight movement as she lowered her head to aim her horn, and that was enough warning to dodge. Then I turned and ran, putting Luna’s lessons in evasive maneuvering to good use – her next two shots went wide as well. By then, I’d made it to the edge of the forest, and vanished into the undergrowth. I expected her to be right on my tail, but the trees and bushes would give concealment and cover, and a slight hope of getting away. It turned out that she wasn’t even chasing me. She’d been distracted. === “Cloud Kicker, what are you doing here?” Twilight asked. “I just saw you with a couple of changelings, and wondered if they’d be interested in coming over to a private party at my place,” she replied, draping her front hooves over the edge of her napping-cloud. “We’re not changelings,” Thirty told her. “We’re clones from the mirror pool.” “Shh!” Twilight hissed, but it was too late. Cloud was already swooping down and standing very close to Thirty, virtually nose to nose. “Really? Oh wow! I’ve heard stories, but I was never able to find it… can you imagine the fun I could have with a few more of me?” “You know why that’s a terrible idea,” Twilight said. “Pinkie Pie’s clones almost destroyed Ponyville.” Cloud Kicker waved a wing at the princess. “Please! At best they annoyed Ponyville. And I’d only make one.” “You said ‘a few’,” Twilight pointed out. “Since you’re so concerned, I’ll make one, okay? Just tell me where to find it!” “You’ll make none!” Twilight said. “Just go home, and forget all about this. The mirror pool isn’t a toy, and neither are the clones it makes!” “Fine,” the pegasus said, taking to the air. “Party pooper.” She stuck her tongue out and made a rude noise as she flew off. “Now what do I do about you two?” Twilight asked, turning on the clones. She really should have remembered to come chase me – or at least paid attention to which way Cloud Kicker was flying. I was still racing through the forest at top speed when the pegasus landed in front of me with a loud crash and a jaunty grin. I had no idea what had just happened, so I assumed she was working with Twilight to catch me. Since most of my combat training was as a bat pony, my panicked reaction was to rear up and try to stab her with my spear… only I didn’t have a spear, so I just sort of kicked at her with my forehooves. She caught one of them in her teeth, and flipped me onto my back, pinning me to the leafy ground. “Where is it?” she asked. I stared at her. “What?” “The mirror pool. Where is it.” “I don’t know,” I said, still a bit confused. “It was night, and we were totally lost after leaving it. I guess you could just look for that weird patch of brambles? It’s in the middle of those.” Cloud Kicker snorted. “’The twistiest of vines’. Yeah, I checked there years ago. Nothing there but a giant rock.” “It’s under the rock,” I said. “Was under the rock. We moved the rock to get out.” “Oh,” she said, then grinned, and gave me a kiss. “Thanks!” I think you can see where this is going. Through the Looking GlassThe first thing I remember was panicking, as the last of my memories washed away when I emerged from the pool. They’d tricked me! I didn’t know who, or how, but somehow that thought alone survived the transition, probably by virtue of being formed in the middle of the memory wipe. “Yeah, I’m a cutie all right,” came a voice from in front of me, and I snapped my gaze over to see who was talking. Pegasus, a middle-aged mare, light blue-or-maybe-purple with a yellow mane. Cutie mark of a sun and clouds. She was circling around me, staring me up and down like I was a piece of meat. I looked back at myself, and saw that I was her twin. There was a sort of mental spark, and I suddenly realized that my purpose in life was to serve her, sexually. “Oh,” I said. “I’m some sort of magical construct. I guess that explains why I can’t remember anything.” “Yeah,” she said. “So you have to do what I say. So…” she brushed her wing down my back, gently tickling me with the feathers, and smiled as my tail raised of its own accord. “What do you say we go back to my place, and engage in a little self-love?” I turned and grabbed the leading edge of her wing in my teeth, nibbling a bit on the coverts, and reached up to stroke along her jawline with a hoof. “Mmm.” “Is that a yes?” she asked, spreading her wing farther to present it to my attentions, with a dreamy look on her face. I released it, and gave her a kiss. It was a pretty long kiss, with quite a bit of tongue. After it was finally over, I gave her a nuzzle, and said, “No, that was a yes.” Then we both giggled. It’s hard to describe how I felt as the two of us made our way up the stairs, flirting and teasing and occasionally stopping to make out. It was like – my purpose was simple, and I was doing it well, and liking it, and it promised to be even more enjoyable in the future. So I was happy. There was nothing at all wrong with my life. Then we got to the top of the stairs, and I saw that we were surrounded by brambles, with a thick canopy of vine-strangled branches overhead to make it so we couldn’t just fly out. “The exit’s this way,” Cloud Kicker said, prancing over towards one edge of the small clearing, making sure to give me a good view. “It’s hard to see, but not that hard to crawl through. Just remember to keep your wings closed!” The opening was small, and surrounded by twisty thorny vines on all sides – we’d have to crawl and would probably get a little scratched up anyways. But the thorns weren’t as sharp as they looked, so our hide mostly protected us. Cloud Kicker ordered me to go first to clear the way, but it didn’t take long for me to realize her true agenda. When she ‘accidentally’ bumped her muzzle under my tail and started licking, well… it was a nice distraction from the thorns. She pushed me to keep moving, after a few seconds, but managed to keep up. I was hardly crawling at full speed with that distraction. But just as we finally came to the exit, the way was blocked by a young, mint-colored unicorn, who looked at me in a bit of a panic. “Cloud Kicker?” she said. “I hope you didn’t use the mirror pool yet. I forgot to tell you something really important.” “I think it worked out fine,” I said, with a smile as the tongue behind me switched to a more precise probing at my most sensitive spots, now that we’d stopped for a bit. “How is she supposed to use me? The night is young.” “It’s still morning,” came Cloud Kicker’s voice from behind me, and the unicorn in front of me paled. “No! No no no no no!” she said, grabbing my face with her hooves. “You’re not Lyra. Tell me you’re not Lyra!” So I kissed her. I was made for sex, after all. And Cloud Kicker’s always up for a threesome, so we held the unicorn down – Cloud called her Lyra – and made her squeal and moan, and squirm around in pleasure, right there in the forest. “I’m going to cast a spell on you,” Lyra said to me, afterwards. “And then I’ll need you to answer some questions.” “I’m not sure I should let you,” I told her. “You’re not my master.” “Oh, knock yourself out,” Cloud said, waving a wing dismissively. “I can always make another.” So she did. And I remembered… everything. It was a bit overwhelming, and there was enough stress and worry and pain in it all that it completely ruined my good mood. Especially the last part. === “Nine hundred eighty seven thousand six hundred and twenty eight dead pony souls in the pool, nine hundred eighty seven thousand six hundred and twenty eight dead pony souls… let one out to run around, nine hundred eight seven thousand six hundred and twenty seven dead pony souls in the pool!” “I already told you I give up!” the demon screamed in my ears, as I floated in the pool, near the gate. “Stop singing already!” I wasn’t about to stop now, though. Not while it was working! Honestly, I probably wasn’t going to make it all the way to zero, even if the gate continued to stubbornly refuse to open after the earlier flood of activity. “Nine hundred eighty seven thousand six hundred and twenty seven dead pony soul in the pool…” The water shifted around me, and I sang louder momentarily, thinking that the demon was up to something, but then I felt the warmth on my back as the surface of the pool started to glow, and a hoof reached down into the water. I took it, and it pulled me out. But as the bright surface started to make its way down my leg, I got a glimpse out into the cavern and saw who it was, that was using the pool. It was Cloud Kicker’s face, concentrating on the words as she chanted something that I couldn’t hear. Then everything was light, and agony, as the magic burned away at my body and my identity until I couldn’t hold on to my memories anymore, and let them slip away… Failure to CopeI curled up and cried, wrapping my feathery wings around myself. I wasn’t a magical construct at all. My life wasn’t a simple matter of following Cloud Kicker’s orders and enjoying myself in carnal pleasures. I was a real pony, with responsibilities and friends and consequences to my actions, and it was just too much to take in all at once without screaming in anguish. “What did you do to her?!” Cloud Kicker asked. “I don’t know!” Lyra said. Not Lyra. A Lyra-clone. A crazy psycho Lyra clone who’d already killed dozens of ponies, because even if the clones weren’t really the ponies they looked like, they were flesh and blood and had a mind and a spirit and what else do you want? And meanwhile, Twilight and the other two surviving clones were back in Ponyville talking about the magical theory behind the pool, planning to go make a clone at sunset, which was hours and hours from now. “None of the others reacted this way,” not-Lyra said. “Maybe it’s because she looks like you?” “No,” I said, my eyes still squinted shut from the tears. “It’s because I’m the real one, and it’s going to be so much work. I thought I could just exist as Cloud Kicker’s plaything, and that would be so much simpler…” “The real what?” Cloud Kicker asked. “I’m the real Lyra,” I said, rolling onto my belly and turning my head to face her. “So I can’t be your sex slave. I have to go home and somehow tell Bon Bon about all this, and explain why I’m apparently a pegasus now… oh this is awful! I don’t know the first thing about being a pegasus! How can I even play a lyre without magic? I know they were designed to be played with your wings but I never had the right sort of wings to try that, even as a batpony!” “I’m lost,” Cloud Kicker said. “I think I’m going to head home, and you two can sort this out. If either one of you wants to be my sex slave, even if it’s just for the night or whatever, well – you know where to find me.” She grinned. I smiled back, weakly, and she flew off. “You’re right,” not-Lyra said. “This is terrible. I can’t be a pegasus. You should just… leave town. I’ll tell Twilight I’m the real Lyra, and take over for you. She used a Reforming Spell to give me the right personality and everything –“ “You’re a crazy psycho,” I reminded her. “I haven’t killed anypony real!” she protested. “The constructs don’t count!” “I don’t understand why you would think that,” I said. “I was talking with the demon in the well about what exactly it was, and it’s not really a demon at all. It’s just an amalgam of all the ponies that were absorbed into the well, and stayed there too long to retain their own identity. When the gate opens, one of them leaves for a while. Sometimes they never come back. There’s no time limit.” “But they’re just fakes,” not-Lyra said. “Copies.” I shook my head. “Even if they were, you shouldn’t kill them!” “I didn’t have any choice! The dragons would have killed us all!” “No, they would have killed you first, and most of the clones would have gotten away,” I said. “But that’s not even who I’m thinking of. It was the first clone you made. The one you murdered. Yes, there was a dream where I thought about doing something crazy like that to a magical construct because she ‘wasn’t a pony’, but I didn’t follow through on it, and I certainly didn’t enjoy it! Twilight tried to make you into a replacement for me, but she goofed.” “Shut up!” she said, standing up and glaring at me. “You know I’m right,” I said. “I’m just repeating back the things that you already thought. I have your memories, remember? I know that you know that you’re broken.” “Stop. Talking.” Her horn lit up, and I wondered what she was going to try to shoot at me. She didn’t know the spell to send ponies into the mirror pool, and I wasn’t really a strong enough caster to do anything else effective. Also, everypony knows that you don’t try to cast on a hostile target inside twenty feet. They can just jump on you and whack your horn, and not only will you lose the spell, you’ll get a really nasty headache and not be able to cast for a while. I guess she just wasn’t thinking. She certainly wasn’t thinking anything coherent after I jumped on her and whacked her horn. I pinned her down, and we wrestled for a bit. I was hoping that I could hold her down until she calmed down enough that we could go talk to Twilight and sort this all out without any more drama. I’d had my cry, and she’d had her temper tantrum, so we should all be able to talk this out like competent adults. Unfortunately, she was trying to kill me, and we weren’t really very good at wrestling – Luna had mostly had us learn weapon attacks, and a bit of hoof to hoof, in the short time that we’d spent in her Guard. In Cloud Kicker’s toned weather-pony pegasus body, I was a lot stronger than she was in her layabout unicorn body, but I didn’t know how to keep her pinned, so she kept breaking free and trying to kill me, and I’d have to stop her and hold her down and pin her again, and it was getting tiring. “Please, calm down!” I panted, as she squirmed out of my grip again. “Die, you self-righteous nag!” she screamed at me, and head-butted me in the chin. With her horn. It tore through the base of my jaw and shattered a bunch of teeth, and the pain was enough to make me gurgle out a scream and let go of her… and while I was trying to get ahold of myself she kicked me in the face, making it all hurt twice as much, and then reared up and stomped on my head. There was a crunch, and a moment of confusion… …and then I woke up in my living room, sprawled out on the floor next to the discarded bits of my Night Guard armor. Back in my own body – my real body, freed from concept space when the bat-pony transformation was finally cancelled by my death. Bon Bon was sitting on the couch, staring at me. She was not amused. The Finer Points of Tentacle SexI haven’t actually had sex with a lot of things with tentacles, and certainly this was my first tentacle demon. Considering the danger, I can’t recommend it – everything turned out fine for me, but it was a close thing and I got very lucky! Otherwise… yes. It was good. The tentacles were firm, but soft, and changed shape to fill me completely, stretching me out just enough to hurt just enough to make it perfect. Like they could read my mind. And they came from everywhere, to stroke lightly over every part of my body at once, holding me tightly enough to let me squirm and struggle, but not escape. I opened my mouth to moan, and a tentacle flowed inside, playing with my tongue like a kiss, before thickening and pressing gradually into my throat. I jerked, and tried to cough it out, but it was too strong for me, and my lungs started to scream for air. As the ache worked its way through my body, the tentacle at my other end thrust faster and harder, peaking that pain as well. I shuddered uncontrollably as the certainty that I was about to die set me off, the waves of tingling pleasure surging through me, turning the pain and terror into a desperate joy… And then they kept me there, for minutes, because I didn’t actually need to breathe. My muscles and lungs were on fire, but it was a good pain… and when the forest of invisible tentacles surrounding me slithered away, leaving me in a small, air-filled pocket, it was pure bliss. I lay there bonelessly, gasping for air, twitching slightly, and convulsing around the last remaining tentacle, still thrusting into me, until there was an explosion of frost inside me, and then it softened and pulled out. The air was warm. The floor was soft and cool, and the walls were softly lit by an ambient blueish light. I was weak, aching, dripping with sweat and my own juices, and everything was right with the world. Sex is kind of creepy that way. All’s Well that Ends“And that’s the whole story,” Lyra said, taking another sip of her milkshake as she sat at the table outside the café. Bon Bon and Rose were sitting with her, the former with a slight frown, the latter with the usual bemused smile she tended to hold while listening to one of Lyra’s stories. “Not-me had to know what had happened – the way the bat-pony spell disintegrates the old body is pretty distinctive – and no one’s seen hide of hair of her ever since. She probably just ran off into the Everfree. Maybe she’s dating Garble or something. “As for the other two clones… after Bon Bon finished yelling at me –“ “I never said I was done,” Bon Bon said. “Maybe I’m just resting up for the next session.” Lyra grinned, and took another sip of her milkshake. “When Bon Bon momentarily paused in her yelling at me, I went and found Twilight and explained what I’d figured out about how the mirror pool worked. She agreed that we should let Number Two and Thirty stay, if they wanted to. They just couldn’t stay here, in Ponyville, because it would be too confusing for everypony. Number Two shipped out to Vanhoover, waaay on the other side of the continent, and Thirty decided to try her luck in Canterlot.” “In the Night Guard?” Rose asked. “Oh, no,” Lyra said, laughing. “No, she isn’t a killer. She’s going to try to make it as a classical musician, since they did inherit my cutie mark and all of my training. She’s nowhere near as lazy as I am, so maybe she’ll be able to stand being in one of the big orchestral troupes.” “I suppose I’ll keep an eye out for her the next time we go to the opera,” Rose said. “But wait – if the mirror pool copies the cutie mark, and the bat-pony transformation doesn’t change it, shouldn’t you still have Cloud Kicker’s talent?” She turned to look at Lyra, and down at her flank, then raised an eyebrow at her as she noticed how the light sun dress Lyra was wearing obscured her hips. Bon Bon just continued to glower. “Um… no comment,” Lyra said. “Nice weather we’re having, don’t you think?”
A Really Bad Idea (or two)I guess you could say that it all started with Spike, like a lot of these stories do. This shouldn’t be that surprising, since he’s one of the most important dragons in my life. We spend so much time together, talking about magic or making out. I really love his backrubs, and his scales, and he loves it when I go off on a tangent about some improbable corollary to a lesser-known magical law. I’m pretty sure he also likes it when I kiss him. He always acts like he’s embarrassed, but he’s never told me to stop. He doesn’t like it when I ask him to eat me, but when I’m lying there on the couch, my tongue sliding against his sharp dragon fangs, while his claws scrape across my skin, under the thin hair on my belly, I just can’t help thinking about it. And sometimes, I can’t help thinking about it some more as I skip through the streets towards the house where Bon Bon and I live, still tingling from his touch, and I can’t help fantasizing about it as I remember just how much being stabbed and gutted and eaten by spiders hurt during my very short time in Luna’s Night Guard. And this time, I decided that I’d put on the magic armor Luna let me take home with me, which usually just gathers dust in the closet, and tap the dragon-eye gem that activates its magic, and wiggle around on the floor as the not-quite-pain of transformation squirms through my body like a million little worms, and then screech hypersonically as I got myself off right there, in the middle of the living room floor. As I was coming back to my senses, I remembered that I had to die in order to change back into a unicorn, and that Luna didn’t like for us to spend a lot of time out in public as a bat pony, and that since it was Sunday, Bon Bon was out at the marketplace selling her candy, and had a date with Rose afterwards, and probably wouldn’t be home until morning. The sensible thing to do – and I was back to my senses, remember? – would have been to lurk about the house, all on my own, with nothing to amuse myself with except for my lyre and all my worldly possessions and a few library books on musical theory and acoustics and Bon Bon’s weird collection of creepy ceramic masks. She’d promised to kill me if I ever touched them, so it would have been the perfect solution. But the less sensible part of me had a different plan. === The glass shattered as I burst in through the library’s skylight, the light glinting off the razor-sharp shards until they evaporated halfway to the floor. Twilight knows Rainbow Dash, and stopped using actual glass in her windows ages ago. The breakaway quasi-matter windows still made a satisfying ‘crash!’ as you burst through them – Rainbow begged her for weeks to put that feature in. It was probably a good thing it wasn’t real glass, since I’d left the armor at home as part of my ruse, and would have gotten some pretty bad cuts breaking through a real window. I’m going to say that I planned it that way, over and over again until that’s how I remember it. Anyway, after my dramatic entrance, I circled around in midair above the library shelves, hissing. Spike looked up from the book he was reading. “Oh, hi Lyra.” “Who is this ‘Lyra’? I am a ninja assassin, here to murder your master!” “Uh huh,” Spike said. “And why would you tell me about your evil plan?” “Because you will assist me, or you will die!” I said, landing on top of a bookshelf, then waggling my wings to keep my balance as it wobbled a few times before settling back into place. “Where is she? So that I might MURDER her!” “Lyra, stop it,” Spike said. “No! You cannot stop me!” I screeched. “I do not fear your vicious claws, or your razor sharp teeth, and I know that you do not dare use your fire here in your own inner sanctum!” Spike pursed his lips, and breathed a narrow line of fire right at me. I squeaked and jumped back into the air, only to see it end about a foot from the shelf. “Well, I do not fear it either, even so! Prepare to defend yourself, or I will use my evil ninja magic on your shattered corpse, and wrest the location of Twilight Sparkle from your mind!” “Did somepony call my name?” Twilight asked, walking into the main room from her little reading nook. “Oh, hi Lyra. What’s with the bat costume?” “I’m not Lyra! Why do you think I’m Lyra?” “Because we can see your cutie mark?” Spike said. “Oh.” I paused for a few seconds to gather my thoughts. “Well, a lyre is a common cutie mark for assassins – the strings are perfect for strangling ponies and dragons with.” “That’s a myth,” Twilight said. “Pony neck muscles are far too strong for the classic garrote as seen in the movies to do much more than leave a nasty welt. Not to mention that if the wire doesn’t have handles on it, you’re going to do more damage to your pastern than to your target.” “Poison!” I said, triumphantly. “You poison the wire.” “Lyra,” Twilight said, letting her wings droop a bit, and her gaze fall to the side. “Come with me up to my room. We need to talk.” “But I wanted to fight your dragon,” I whined. Twilight responded by encasing me in her magical field and holding me frozen in place while she dragged me into her bedroom. I had the feeling this was not going to be nearly as much fun as I’d always imagined. === “You have to stop bothering Spike,” Twilight said, after dumping me onto my back in the middle of her rather impressive bed. It had to have been created by the magic of harmony that created the entire castle, because I couldn’t imagine Princess Twilight Sparkle dropping by the furniture store and asking for a custom made king-sized six-poster bed in the shape of her cutie mark. Then again, the mattress didn’t feel even the slightest bit like it was made out of crystals. I bounced up and down on it a couple times, testing the springs. Maybe it was quasi-matter? “I’m serious, Lyra,” Twilight said. “You have to stop harassing him.” “Wait, what?” I said, replaying what she’d just said. A chill ran down my body. “You don’t want me to see Spike anymore?” “Lyra –“ “You can’t do this, Twilight!” I said, tears forming in my eyes. “He’s one of my best friends! And he loves spending time with me? How could you possibly – mmmph.“ The rest of my plea was cut off as my mouth zipped itself shut. “That’s not what I mean!” Twilight said. “Look, if Spike wants to spend his time dallying with you, then I’m not going to tell him that you’re… well… you. I’m pretty sure he knows you as well as I do.” I snickered, through the zipper. “Better than I do,” Twilight admitted, blushing. “But you have to stop asking him to eat you. I mean, unless you mean it figuratively – I have nothing against cunnilinguis, and with that ridiculous tongue of his it seems like he’d be really good at that sort of thing.” The zipper vanished. “You mean you haven’t tried it out? After all these years?” Twilight sighed. “I’m trying to be serious, here. If you and Spike are going to be an item, then that’s fine. But I can’t have you pestering him to eat you. I care about him, and I don’t want to see him hurt.” “I haven’t been!” I said, flipping onto my hooves. “I haven’t asked him to eat me even once! I mean, in the last few weeks.” “Until now,” she said. “Well, he was supposed to think I was some random assassin,” I said, cringing a bit. “I guess I could have put a bit more effort into my disguise.” “Lyra,” Twilight said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this – and I mean that literally, not sarcastically, because while you’ve shown no sign of noticing anything, I’ve underestimated your perceptiveness too many times to ignore the possibility that you might not be as clueless as you seem…” She trailed off, then picked her train of thought back up off the ground. “Have you noticed that Spike is falling in love with you?” “That’s silly,” I said. “I mean, I know we fool around all the time, but that’s because he’s an adolescent colt and I’m a mare who’s willing to give him the time of day. He doesn’t act all crazy about me like he always did with Rarity.” I waved my hooves around in crazy motions, balancing with a few flaps of my wings, then set them back down on the bed, which bobbed up and down for a while until the springs settled. “Besides, I’m not available for a relationship. Bon Bon and I are just roommates.” Twilight looked like she might have broken something inside her head trying to parse that last bit. “And what if he is?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure that would make him less likely to eat me.” Twilight leaned forwards. “Lyra, Spike defines himself by his helpfulness and loyalty. There is nothing he wouldn’t do for the mare he loves. Nothing.” “Oh,” I said. “And that’s… bad?” I tilted my head. “No matter how much it would hurt him,” she added. “But he’s a dragon!” I said. “He’s allowed to eat ponies. That’s what dragons do!” “Not Spike,” Twilight said, firmly. “Lyra, the last thing we need is for Spike to be pushed closer to his dragon heritage. Dragons who act like dragons can’t live with ponies, and he made his choice long before the two of you started hanging out together. If you love him at all, you’ll stop pushing him into doing something that would only make him hate himself.” My ears flattened, and my wings folded against my sides. I dropped to the bedspread, and sighed. “I believe that your logical syllogism is false, Twilight. I know that he shouldn’t give in, although I think you’re wildly exaggerating the danger of that, but it’s something that I want so much. It’s hard not to ask for my heart’s desire, when it’s sitting there, pressed up against me, his fangs at my throat…” I shivered a bit, my wings fluttering out of sync. “When I heard about Luna’s Night Guard, I thought it might be good for you,” Twilight said. “I thought it might help you get this out of your system.” I took a deep breath. “It helps, but… it’s just a taste. The armor is a huge temptation, and on balance I don’t think it’s making me less interested in this sort of thing at all.” I sighed. “But I was miserable, trying to be her guard full time. It was just so exhausting! So much fighting, so much training… so much Diamond Tiara. Ugh.” Twilight giggled, then put a hoof to her mouth to stifle it. “I’ve been thinking about this,” she said, once she’d gone back to her serious face. “And I have an alternative.” “I’m listening,” I said. “A magical solution to your problem,” she continued. “I’m listening with considerably more trepidation than before, given your track record on solving things with magic,” I said. Then, because I was curious, “What did you have in mind?” “A Reforming Spell,” Twilight said. I froze. “Discord somehow managed to eat every copy in Equestria, but I managed to reconstruct one of them from Ego Whip’s original notes. I haven’t tested it --” “Well, thank Celestia for that,” I said, shocked. “Twilight, those spells were forbidden for a reason!” “They’re not forbidden!” Twilight said. “They’re restricted, and as a Princess of Equestria I can give myself permission to cast restricted spells.” “So because I sometimes tease Spike about doing something that he doesn’t want to do, and doesn’t do, and is never going to do, you’re going to turn me into a zombie?!” My wings were spread aggressively, and I was weighing the chances of escape if I just made a run for it compared to trying to stun Twilight with a hoof to the horn or something before making a run for it. Twilight held up a hoof towards me. "You'll still have free will! You'll be able to do whatever you want! Even better, the parameters of what you'll want to do are guaranteed to be within the acceptable social mores of Equestrian society!" “I’ll be gone, and a completely different pony will be living in my body!” “That’s not true at all!” Twilight said. “You’ll be that completely different pony. That normal, well-adjusted, friendly, happy pony.” “Twilight, you can’t –“ I said, but she’d already explained that she could. “You wouldn’t!” I stopped, breathing heavily, and calmed down a little as I realized that that was true. “You wouldn’t.” “Well, of course not,” she said, smiling. “Not without your permission. You don’t have to give me an answer right now –“ “No,” I said. “You can sleep on it, and think about the alternatives –“ “No,” I said again. “No, Twilight, I’m not going to give you permission to cast a Reforming Spell on me. If there’s one good thing that came out of my time in the Night Guard, it’s that I’m confident that, even if I have strange fantasies sometimes, I’m not a danger to myself or others. Now kill me.” Twilight blinked. “You’re not going to let Spike do it, and Luna doesn’t like me walking around in this body any longer than necessary. That means it’s up to you.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m sure you can make it quick and painless and completely boring.” “Wait,” Twilight said. “So you just want to end the spell that summoned that body from the Shadow Realm? I think I have a spell for that.” She walked over to one of the shelves in her bedroom. “I keep a few books here that have sentimental value, even if they don’t belong in circulation,” she explained, as she scanned a hoof down the row. “Aha, here it is.” I hopped off the bed – it took two hops – and walked over to see what book she’d found. “Legend of the Mirror Pool?” It didn’t mean anything to me at the time – I grew up in Canterlot, and hadn’t heard many of the local Ponyville legends. If I had, I would have run away and let Bon Bon kill me in the morning. Twilight flipped to the back of the book, where a small spell was described. I tried to read it over her shoulder, but she was a much faster reader than I was, and I hadn’t gotten far before she finished and put the book back on the shelf. “Are you ready?” she asked. “Will it hurt?” “There might be some slight discomfort, but no, it shouldn’t hurt,” Twilight replied. I pouted. “Sorry, but I don’t want to encourage you to make a habit of this,” Twilight said, before pointing her horn at me and firing off the spell, quicker than I expected. I felt my body go numb, and float up off the floor… and my legs and wings wouldn’t move, and my mouth wouldn’t even open. It was like I was being filled full of air, overinflated like a rubber balloon. Then I popped, and everything was dark. And cold. And wet. This was not my living room.
Alone in a CrowdObviously, my first reaction was to thrash about wildly, trying to figure out which way was up, and ruining any chance of feeling it out by spinning in place and waving my limbs around until I was dizzy. Eventually, I noticed that I hadn’t drowned. I also noticed that I was still a bat pony, since two of the limbs I was flailing around were bat wings. So I chirped. The high-pitched sound echoed through the water, reflecting off a large flat surface beneath me at an angle. In every other direction, there was no return – the water went on forever. Or else whatever the chirp hit was acoustically dead. Echolocation isn’t perfect. So I swam down towards the flat surface, and discovered that it was glowing, slightly. Or rather, that it was the surface of the water, and that I had been completely wrong about which way was up. Something was glowing beyond it, but the water I was in was nearly opaque, so the light didn’t travel far. I tried to break through the smooth, mirror-like surface of the water, but found it a barrier that I couldn’t penetrate. So I pressed myself up against it, instead, to get a better look at whatever was beyond. It was a cave, with glowing mushrooms. To one side, I thought I saw a staircase. I kicked my bat pony form’s cloven hooves against the surface, but they just stopped when they reached it, without even the courtesy of the sort of jarring pain you’re supposed to get when you kick something with all your strength and it doesn’t break. I tried to swim for the edge of the pool, but no matter how far I thought I moved I never got more than halfway towards the edge. I decided that panicking was called for, so I did that for a while. Eventually I got sick of it, so I curled up and cried. When I’d cried myself out, I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t stop being conscious, and lying there not doing anything was not only boring, but threatened to push me back into panic mode. So I ‘woke up’ and tried to think rationally about the situation, and I realized that there were only a few things I hadn’t tried. One of them was to swim deeper into the pool, and see if I could find another exit that was actually an exit and not just a vision of an outside world put there to taunt me. The other was to start composing depressing music about my plight, and keep sane by singing to myself. It occurred to me that I could pretend that I could craft a spell-song to dispel the barrier, which would let me feel like I was being productive while putting off exploring or doing anything else useful indefinitely, since composing music wasn’t exactly a fast process. So, that decided that. I based the song on one of the counter-songs that Twilight had taught me, and tried to adapt it to my current problem. I’ve spent my life pursuing infamy and fame, But I don’t need the ponies calling out my name. The one and only thing That makes my spirit sing Is music. It’s the music. It’s the music in my heart. So I’ll break out, and set myself free! Gonna go home, and brew me some tea… And I can’t think of good words This is getting quite absurd But I’m sure that it’ll make me, um, free as a bird? And that wasn’t even my first attempt. Needless to say, the magical barrier failed to fall before my musical prowess. “Gah! This isn’t working!” I slammed my head against the barrier, or at least I think I did? My eyes were closed, so I might have missed. There was still no sensation of hitting anything. “Do you need some help?” asked the creepiest chorus of slightly-out-of-sync voices in dozens of different pitches that I’ve ever heard, and I’m including the giant spider demon. My eyes shot open, and I froze in terror, like an ice cube bobbing in a punchbowl. I felt cold, slimy tentacles slipping around me, curling around my limbs and torso, but I was too scared to look. Also, suddenly aroused. Go figure. The tentacles seemed to notice, because one of them inched towards my crotch, while the creepiest voice ever asked, “Will this help you relax?” “Probably,” I managed, squeezing my hind legs together and curling the pathetic stump of a bat-pony tail. “That doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea. I’m not sure relaxing is really appropriate, since I don’t know how much danger I’m in. Are you a friendly tentacle demon, or just the sort of monster that plays with its food? Is this world even real? “To us, it’s more real than the world outside the mirror,” the voice replied. “The creatures from beyond the mirror tend to disagree, of course.” “What would happen if I died here?” I asked, as a tentacle slithered around my neck, not squeezing uncomfortably tight, but instead caressing and tickling, like a fairly skilled lover who happened to have tentacles. “We are unsure… death has no place here. If you were torn to pieces, the pieces would survive, and we would absorb them, and add them to our collective.” “Right,” I said. “And, hypothetically speaking, is this something that you usually do to the ponies you catch in your tentacles, after you have your way with them?” The voice laughed. “Most ponies choose to join us without being torn apart.” The tentacle squirmed its way between my legs, wiggling between my thighs as it headed for my slit. “But you are already different, staying by the gate for so long. You should relax, and join us, and together we will sing your song, and perhaps we will escape this world as our true selves, at last.” “That seems like an incredibly bad idea,” I replied, relaxing a little despite myself. It’s hard to hold on to a state of utter terror when somepony is willing to talk to you in a reasonable tone of voice. I bet most of the smarter predators know that trick, but even knowing that it was probably a trick, I couldn’t help but relax. “As in, I find it impossible to believe that anypony would actually agree to it.” The tentacle reached my crotch, and slowly licked its way up the length of my slit, like it was a tongue, and even though I was soaking wet due to being underwater, the cold slick chill of whatever it was that the tentacle was made out of felt wetter than wet. “There is much we can offer, and nothing for you to gain by remaining apart,” the voice replied. “This gate will not let you leave as yourself. Even we are constrained by its enchantment, the fragments of us that are drawn out bound to the whims of the ponies that invoke it.” “I have friends, and they’ll find a way to get me out of here,” I said, as the tentacle pressed its way just inside me and started to explore. “I was sent here by mistake, and if Twilight doesn’t realize that right away, she’s sure to check on me in the morning. I just have to hold out until then… it can’t be long now. I’ve already been here for hours.” “Time has little meaning here,” the voice said, the cold slimy tentacle on my neck slithering its way down the length of my chin, then up the side of my face. I really should have been able to see it, but there was nothing. “Especially here, near the gate. What feels like hours may be days, or seconds.” “Oh,” I said, poking at the invisible tentacle with my tongue, and finding nothing to lick at. “Fuck.” Then my limbs jerked against the restraining tentacles as a bolt of slick ice shot into me, penetrating me and filling me with a bitter chill, spreading from my belly. The voice laughed, as it began to thrust. “We thought you’d never ask.”
Lyra 3.0 (now with mirror-soul technology!)The first thing I remembered was the last of my memories washing away as I emerged from the pool. Then, I stared in rapt attention at the pony across from me, the pony that I was copying. It was a mint unicorn, young adult female, well-groomed, with a completely blank look on her face. There was an invisible spark, and I realized that my reason to exist was to do nothing whatsoever. So I stood there, staring blankly, as she was briefly outlined with a pink magical aura and collapsed in a heap. I felt nothing. I still felt nothing as the purple-furred alicorn responsible turned her horn on me next, and cast a series of spells, none of which made me collapse. “Divine contamination?” she muttered, after one of the spells. She lifted a book off the stone floor of the cavern, and held it up next to her where she could refer to it as she cast the same spell again. “That’s just bizarre.” There were a few other results she saw fit to relate aloud – I had a real cutie mark with all the appropriate magic, somehow (she poked at my rump, which gave a pleasurable tingle, but of course I didn’t respond), but no memories whatsoever, aside from the ones I was forming. “Lyra?” she asked. When I didn’t respond right away, she waved a hoof in front of my face. I followed it with my eyes automatically. “Lyra? Are you in there?” I tilted my head slightly. I wasn’t sure how to respond. My purpose was to do nothing. Would responding count as a thing? “Answer me,” the alicorn ordered. “I’m here,” I said. “Are you Lyra? The real Lyra?” “I’m a copy of her,” I said, pointing to the unconscious pony, which seemed to be slowly dissolving, the edges already a bit misty. “How are you feeling?” she asked, and apparently despite my lack of memories, the skill-memory I’d been left with included idioms, since I understood what she meant by the question. So I responded, “I don’t feel anything.” “You’re not afraid because you lost your memory?” she asked. “You’re not curious about who you are?” “I don’t feel anything,” I confirmed. “This doesn’t make any sense!” She pointed a hoof at me. “You don’t make any sense! Pinkie’s clones at least had a personality!” “My purpose is to help her do nothing,” I explained. We went back and forth like that for a while, and then she started casting more spells. I’m going to skip ahead to the first thing I felt, which was curiosity at the intricate magic worming its way through my head, and fear that it was going to change me into something that couldn’t fulfil my purpose. Then fear that the fear meant that I already wasn’t fulfilling my purpose. Then, I suddenly had the urge to play the lyre, which terrified me because it just came out of nowhere. “What are you doing?” I asked, during a break where the alicorn sat down on the stone, gingerly poking at her horn as it slowly cooled off. “Oh, Celestia,” she said. “Casting un-optimized spells is exhausting.” “What are you doing to me?” I asked her again. “What did you do to me? Why am I even asking you these questions?” “Good, good,” she said. “You’re scared, and curious. Don’t worry, I’m almost done reconstructing your personality. This isn’t really the intended use for a Reforming Spell, but it is a straightforward application.” She paused. “Actually, if you want I could stop now. You have enough of a personality to be a full pony. The things I’d be leaving out aren’t really… they’re not really that important.” She didn’t seem entirely sincere. I narrowed my eyes at her, suspiciously. “Fine, fine, I’ll give you back your stupid obsessions,” she said, clambering to her feet. “You’d notice if I left them out after I gave you back your memories, anyway.” There was more pink light, and another squirmy sensation running through my head, and for a second, I wanted to kill her. Whatever she was doing to me was really unpleasant, and I hadn’t even been able to understand the concept of something being unpleasant until she’d done it. I wanted to pin her in place, and make squirmy little tendrils of magic slither through her head until it exploded! I wanted to pull off all her legs and wings and hit her with them until they shattered! I wanted to shave her bare and cover her with something really itchy. Of course, before she’d started, she’d restrained me by tying all four hooves together, and cast some weird spell on my horn that kept me from using any magic, so I couldn’t do any of that. I grudgingly admired her methodical dedication to safety, although it would have been more impressive if she didn’t keep using those cheat-sheets to make sure she didn’t forget anything. I struggled against my bonds for a while, gleefully ignoring her demand that I stay still and stop wiggling, until she touched her horn to mine, and I suddenly remembered everything. Well, not everything. Just everything that I ever knew, in perfect clarity. It was kind of disturbing. “Did that work?” Twilight asked. “Lyra? Are you with me?” “What did you just do?” I asked, trying to sort out which memories were recent and which were distant. The only ones I could be sure of were the ones of being there in the cave, not remembering anything, because they were fresh. “Everything’s… out of order.” Twilight frowned. “I couldn’t use a standard memory spell since your head was completely empty, so I took a memory we had in common, used the law of contagion to expand the scope from that one memory to every Lyra-flavored memory in existence, and then pruned out all the memories that weren’t from your point of view. Did it work? Can you remember everything?” She paused. “Can you remember anything that you didn’t do?” “Would I know if I didn’t remember everything?” I asked, trying to randomly remember things, which is harder than it sounds. I remembered having sex with Bon Bon, and having sex with Cloud Kicker, and making out with Spike, and then as hard as I tried I couldn’t actually think about anything other than sex, until I got frustrated and thought about oranges. Wow, when was the last time I’d had an orange? “Wait,” I said, “am I a changeling?” “No?” “Because I remember being a changeling. Oh, wow,” I said, as a scene played out in my mind’s eye. “I remember being, like, three changelings. At the same time. Talking to each other.” I remembered what I’d been thinking, as I carefully showed only a friendly smile to my fellow infiltrators. “They really don’t like each other much.” “I guess I should have expected that,” Twilight said. "I know! When your whole life revolves around being a horrible pony, you have to know that you’re a horrible pony, and so is everyone you know. I wouldn’t like me if I was a lovesucking vampire, either,” I said, with a firm nod. Twilight laughed. “No, I mean that it accidentally gathered extra memories from ponies who only looked like you. I had to come up with the spell on the spot, and those never work quite right.” “I remember being a night guard, though?” I asked. “I don’t look anything like myself as a night guard.” “It goes by your cutie mark,” Twilight explained. “Changelings copy those, too.” I nodded. “And so does the mirror pool.” “Speaking of the mirror pool,” Twilight said, leaning forwards eagerly. “How much do you remember about being a part of it?” “Not much,” I admitted. “It seems to wipe our memories when we emerge. I do remember being Lyra, inside it, though…” I paused, considering how much detail I should go into. “How do you feel about tentacle sex?” Twilight stared at me. “What?” “You were conscious inside the pool?” she asked. “As far as I know, I still am,” I said. It wasn’t like I was the real Lyra. “Just… stay there,” Twilight said, backing away. “Don’t touch anything. Don’t do anything! Just wait here and I’m going to go and read a few books and I’ll be right back as soon as I figure out how to… as soon as I figure something out.” She vanished in a pink flash, teleporting away. Then teleported back a few second later. “And don’t touch anything!” BAMF! She vanished again. I sat there for a little while, looking around at all the papers and stuff scattered around the cave. After a bit, I started reading over one of the spell scrolls she’d left behind. I knew that she’d told me not to do anything, but if she really meant it she wouldn’t have left me all alone with her notes.
If at first you don’t succeed…The first thing I remembered was the last of my memories washing away as I emerged from the pool. Then, I stared in rapt attention at the pony across from me, the pony that I was copying. It was a mint unicorn, young adult female, well-groomed, with a nervous look on her face. There was an invisible spark, and I realized that my reason to exist was to help her with some sort of magical project, which was going to be hard because I didn’t remember the fourth thing about magic. The first thing is that it’s glowy. I knew a couple more things, too, like telekinesis and light. I lit my horn up to better illuminate the dim cavern, and could see a crumbling staircase off in the corner leading up into darkness, and a shimmering mirror pool beside me. “Magic?” I asked. “I don’t suppose you’re the real Lyra,” the pony in front of me said, lighting her horn up as well. “Am I supposed to be the real Lyra?” I asked. “I could explain, but I’d rather just cast the spell,” she said, leaning forwards and letting our horns touch. Faint glimmers of understanding started to dawn in my mind, and they intensified as the other unicorn strained to put more power into her spell. My head swam as I tried to make sense of them. Suddenly, there was an epiphany, and everything fell into place. She collapsed, exhausted. My head ached sympathetically, since I remembered casting the spell on myself, and I’d really had to dig into my reserves to get off a spell that powerful. Normal memory spells were pretty easy – for me, I mean. They’re tricky, but a sufficiently talented foal could cast them. Twilight’s variant was still complicated, but also insanely unoptimized. It gathered up a hundred times as many memories as it needed, then used even more power to throw away the extras. Also, it was pretty terrifying, since there was nothing in the spell that required the memory filter and the target of the spell to be the same. Yes, cast as written it would give somepony back their own memories (for the most part), but with a trivial alteration it would give anypony anypony else’s that they or the caster had ever met. And it was only the second scariest spell that Twilight had cast on me – well, on her. “Are you going to do the Reforming Spell next? I thought you were supposed to do it first.” She laughed. “No, I don’t think so. If you’re the real Lyra I don’t need to, and if you’re not I don’t care.” “What would make me the real Lyra?” “It’s pretty simple,” she replied. “The real Lyra was trapped in the pool. Is she still trapped? Did she see the gate activating in time to get to it ahead of the demon?” My ears flattened. “Not exactly. I was discussing philosophy with the demon.” “Huh. I expected more sex.” “I was discussing philosophy with the demon while having sex, yes,” I admitted. “I thought the sex went without saying.” “I didn’t know I was such a prude,” she said, frowning. “I can understand if I was Applejack or somepony that I didn’t want to embarrass, but you have to know that I wouldn’t mind you going into all the juicy details.” “Obviously, I’m no more the real Lyra than you are,” I said. “Euurgh! I tried not to think about sex, and now all I can think about is sex! Make it stop!” So many memories of sex! With so many ponies! What was wrong with me? “Remember your time in the Night Guard?” she suggested. My stomach lurched, as I remembered the feeling of sinking a spear into a living creature. Why had I been fascinated with that kind of thing? What was wrong with me? “I’m going to be sick.” “Do you want me to kill you?” she asked. “I’ve just got this itch to kill somepony, ever since Twilight cast that Reforming Spell, and you’re here, and obviously not feeling good about having my memories.” “What?” I asked. She levitated a thick canvas belt. “I could strangle you. It’d be nice and clean – hardly any blood at all!” I backed away, towards the stairs. “No! I’m here to help you with magic! You were supposed to have me help you with magic!” “Yeah… that was the frame of mind I was in when I summoned you. But now I want a murder victim. Come on… you know you want to help me. It’s your whole reason for existing!” There was a twinge. She kind of had a point. But – no. Encouraging her worst tendencies was not helping! “You’re sick,” I said. “I’ll help you by casting a Reforming Spell.” She laughed, and I continued to back off as she approached. “First of all, there’s no way that you could cast a Reforming Spell. We don’t have enough magic. Second…” A belt wrapped around my throat from behind, and started to squeeze. I kicked and bucked, thrashing around wildly, and managed to break loose. “You’re insane!” I said, as I ran for the stairs. “I’m not insane! You’re just, you know. Expendable. Fake.” She wasn’t rushing, and when I got to the top of the stairs, I could see why – they were blocked by a giant boulder, far too large for a relatively weak unicorn like myself to lift. The only way in or out was to teleport. “Please don’t kill me,” I said, curling up to guard my neck, and trying to look helpless and pitiful. It had worked on me before. “Yeah…” she said, walking up the stairs and stopping near me. “Sorry. This time I am feeling it.” There was a shove, and a brief falling sensation, and then so much pain as I hit the ground – pain, and terror, as I flashed back to the wedding, and the time I’d been tricked into jumping off a cliff. To the hours spent in agony, slowly dying. Not again. Not again! Luckily, this time I’d managed to puncture my lungs when I shattered my ribcage, so I choked to death on my own blood pretty quickly. The other Lyra stared into my eyes as the world faded away, licking her lips eagerly.
The Finer Points of NecromancyOr is it necrophilia? I can never keep those straight. At any rate, I’d just watched myself die, and I was so turned on you couldn’t even believe it. I took her head in my hooves and kissed her, full on the mouth… it really wasn’t a very good kiss. There’s a reason people take living lovers. I rolled her over, and Nightmare’s Teeth, she was a mess – she’d burst open, and there were blood and organs everywhere. I spread her legs and hoofed at her sex, massaging it until it started leaking blood. I leaned down and licked at her, squirming my tongue over her still-warm flesh. I reached up and tangled my hoof in a loop of her intestines, and then pulled a whole mess of them out of her belly and onto mine, as I leaned back until I was lying on the ground next to her, squirming in ecstasy as I rubbed her slick, dripping organs all through my fur. I imagined that I was the one who’d died, and that these were my own organs spread out in a messy heap, as the dragon who’d just disemboweled me loomed over me with dripping fangs… Eventually, she started to get sticky, and cold, and I shoved her body off in a corner and used a cleaning spell to wash off my fur. No sense getting blood in the mirror pool.
Redouble your Efforts“Get back!” my next incarnation shouted, as soon as she had her memories back. I laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. “Urge satisfied! And then some! You know I’m telling the truth, right? You have all my memories.” “You’re sick! What you did to her corpse! How could you even –“ I licked my lips. “Look. I called you up so that we could start a large-scale project. We make a whole bunch of clones, and then the Lyra inside the pool will be sure to notice that something’s going on with the gate, no matter how much the demon tries to distract her. Then we go get Twilight, and she sends you and the other clones back to the pool. No need for anypony to die.” “But we’re trapped in here,” she said. “By that rock.” “A dozen of us should be enough to move it,” I said. Apparently, she was too disoriented by absorbing a lifetime’s worth of memories to remember the entire plan. “Look, we could go back and forth arguing, but you know that you’re going to help me. This is a magical project, and you were created to help me with magical projects. It’s even ethical, so there’s no wiggle-room this time.” She scowled, then turned towards the pool. “Fine,” she spat. “But I just want you to know that you’re a horrible pony.” “It’s not my fault,” I said. “Twilight cast a Reforming Spell on me. I can’t be anything but what she modeled. So no matter what I do, it’s all her fault. What do you think – mass murder spree?” “No!” “I was just kidding,” I said, turning towards the pool. “We can’t go killing real ponies. That’d be…” I took a deep breath. “Wrong. That would be wrong.” Not sexy. Not fun. She didn’t even look at me, but her ears were flat. “Okay,” I said. “On three. Into her own reflection she stared…” So, to make a long story short, we made up about thirty clones, and then waited a little while, and made a thirty-whatever’th. She was the only one out of all of them that got the memory spell. Because for Celestia’s sake, that horrible spell was still a foal of a nag to cast. “Did it work?” I asked. “Did she see the gate in action? Are you…” She shook her head. “She saw it, but the demon wouldn’t let her get close. She knows what she has to do now, at least. They were in the middle of a big argument when you cast the memory spell.” “So… what?” I asked. “She’s going to talk the demon into letting her go?” The last copy smirked. “She was going to sing.” I had to laugh – yeah, that would probably work. Still, while I knew some pretty annoying songs, the demon was an ageless menace, and time didn’t really work the same way inside the pool as out of it. It would take a while to work, and we decided not to just sit around and wait. We’d go get Twilight to send the clones back, using the spell that wouldn’t kill them, and then tomorrow I’d come back and see if the demon was ready to give in and let her go. With thirty of us, it was child’s play to move the boulder aside. That left me and a gaggle of nearly-mindless clones in the middle of the Everfree Forest. At night. I think you can guess where this is heading. No, no, we weren’t all eaten by Manticores!
The Finer Points of Monster HuntingSome of us were. The Manticores are one of the less territorial predators in the Everfree, so they tend to cast a wide net when they go out hunting. But the first monster to find us, as our less-than-stealthy group tried to figure out where we were and which way we were heading, was a Timberwolf. “Oh wow,” said the nearest clone, staring at the Timberwolf in fascination instead of doing something useful, like screaming ‘Timberwolf’. “Get a look at this magical construct! I’ve never seen anything like it!” It growled. Several other clones took that as an invitation to get closer and start poking at it with their hooves. “Is the green stuff nature energy?” one of them asked. “Eww, it stinks,” said a third, scrunching up her nose. There was a snap, and a crunch, and her headless body collapsed to the ground, blood pouring from the mangled remains of her neck. “Ahh! I’m sorry! You smell really nice, honest!” said the first clone, staring at the Timberwolf in horror. It raised its bloody muzzle, and howled. This was the point when the three of us who had memories, and were therefore in charge of leading the pack, stopped arguing about which way was north and noticed that there was a huge freaking Timberwolf about to eat us. “Run! Run, you idiots!” said Number Two, taking her own advice. I was right on her tail, with Thirty close behind me. Answering howls came from all directions, as our little Lyra herd raced off into the darkness. I do have the memories of the three other clones that the Timberwolves got, but it was dark and everypony was confused, and they all died pretty quickly. Timberwolves are quick, you have to give them that. One of them got grabbed by her hind leg, which shattered and twisted out of joint as the Timberwolf swung her around in the air by it. It let go at the top of the arc, and she lost consciousness as soon as she hit the tree. But, anyway, most of us got away, somehow. Maybe they stopped to play with the bodies, once they’d killed a few of us? All we really knew was that we ran for a while, getting even more lost, and then did a headcount and found that there were twenty eight of us left. “You wanted this to happen!” said Number Two, pointing her hoof at me. “You wanted us to get eaten by monsters, so that you could cast the spell on yourself and remember getting eaten by monsters!” “You know that’s not true!” I said. “Although… now that you mention it…” “We don’t know what happens when a clone dies by violence,” Thirty said. “We should try to save as many of them as we can.” “And ourselves,” Number Two added. “Okay, okay,” I said. “No more monsters.” That was when the Manticore attacked. It landed right in the middle of the herd, crushing two clones under its paws, pinning them down as they squirmed in uncomprehending agony with shattered legs and huge gashes torn in their backs. Before they could even scream, all other noise was drowned out by the creature’s terrifying roar! “Manticore!” Number Two squeaked, “Run!” “No, wait,” I said, as I noticed that none of the mindless clones had retreated. “Look –“ Thirty had taken a few steps after Number Two, but stopped and turned back, and we watched the clones circle around the Manticore, calling it names and scolding it for hurting their friends. “Bad kitty!” one of them shouted, bucking it in the side. “Get off them!” another cried, charging at it with her horn. The Manticore’s stinger plunged down reflexively, and she spasmed and collapsed at its feet, writhing in pain and contorting as all her muscles started to lock up. So, yeah, it put up a fight. A clone was gutted with one swipe of its paw, another flung back against a tree by a wing, a third had her head caught in its jaw, and died as it shook her back and forth until her neck shattered. Two more were stung, and joined their herdmate on the ground, slowly dying from the poison. But there were too many of them, and even unicorn ponies have a pretty strong kick. And our horn isn’t just for show! Right, or magic. It’s not just for show and/or magic. You can stab Manticores with it. I don’t think the Manticore was actually close to losing the fight, but the fearlessness of the clones was just too much for it, and the poor thing was spooked. It flew off, nursing a few bruises and puncture wounds, and the surviving clones shouted insults after it, and shot a few bolts of unfocused magic that it probably wouldn’t have noticed even if they’d hit. I took a quick count, once they’d calmed down. Eighteen unhurt, and three more that would probably live, although they’d taken a hit. “We need to keep moving,” I said. “Are you good to travel?” Two of them nodded, but the third shook her head. “My ankle hurts every time I take a step.” “I’ll carry you,” Thirty offered. “No,” I said. “We need to get out of here as quickly as possible, and we can’t have injured or burdened Lyras slowing down the whole group.” The limping clone nodded. “Okay. I’ll follow as fast as I can.” “Oh,” I said, frowning. “Yeah, that would work. I was going to suggest putting you out of your misery but I guess a sprained ankle isn’t really that bad.” “You could finish off the ones who were poisoned,” Thirty suggested. “I think they’re still technically alive.” One of them was, and in total agony. I lined up my horn carefully, and stabbed her in the eye. At first it just popped the eyeball and ground against the socket, but I set my hooves and thrust forwards, and felt bone crack around it as it penetrated her brain. She jerked, and went still. Later, when I got her memory – yeah, she’d been wishing for death. But my horn got stuck, and it was an awkward couple of minutes until Thirty managed to organize the clones to combine their magic and pull me loose. I crushed the skulls of the other two poisoned ponies with my hooves, even though I was pretty sure they were already dead. It turns out that when you’re frustrated and apparently addicted to murder, crushing the skull of a corpse is still pretty satisfying. So we moved on. We lost two to a cockatrice. I just – I don’t even – how could those clones be so stupid? Yes, yes, I should have their memories, let me think. Right. One of them got stoned because she didn’t know any better, and a second joined her because she thought it looked fun. The good news is, they stopped being conscious once they were turned to stone, so at least they weren’t suffering, and we managed to herd the rest away from the budding statue garden before anypony else looked in the creature’s eyes. The bad news is that it wasn’t fun at all – being petrified is apparently pretty painful. We lost one more to some sort of plant-thing. The vines just came down from the tree and snatched her, and she was gone before anypony could really react. In case the message here isn’t getting across, let me be perfectly clear – do not under any circumstances go into the Everfree Forest at night. That place is a Celestia-forsaken death trap! Well, okay, that clone didn’t actually die right away. As of the time I had the memory spell cast on me, she was still alive, just drugged silly and being slowly digested by the plant, which she’d decided she was in love with. There were little roots digging into her flesh in dozens of places, but she was so hopped up on plant venom that it actually felt good. You know – the next time Bonnie’s out of town, I might go see if I can find that plant, with the Night Guard armor on so that I don’t stay dead. It’s not suicide if you don’t stay dead!
The Finer Points of Dragon TamingSo, we had seventeen mindless clones left, plus myself and Thirty, when we ran into the stupid dragons. Yes, those stupid dragons. The teenagers who’d been haunting the forest near Ponyville, until Pip and his posse supposedly drove them off. “You again?” asked the big red one. “What are you doing here?” “You again?” I said, taking a step back. “I thought Pip chased you away!” “We’re nowhere near your stupid pony village!” he protested. “You ponies don’t own the whole forest!” “So we’re heading the wrong way,” Thirty said. “Heh. Heh heh,” the dragon said, grinning. “No, I think this is the way you should have come. After all, it’s not often we have ponies inviting themselves over for dinner.” “Um…” one of the clones asked. “Should we run?” “Do you know the way back to Ponyville?” I asked. “Why do you care?” the dragon asked. “You’re never going to make it back there.” “Look, let’s be reasonable,” I said. “If you try to chase us, you’ll catch, what – one pony each? Maybe two? I can offer you something better than that.” I turned to the clones, and waved my hoof to indicate the small herd. “All you can eat!” “You have no idea how much a dragon can eat, do you,” he said, grinning. I actually had a pretty good idea, from previous experience, and talking to Spike. They could eat a lot. Between the three of them, they’d polished off a pony-sized lump of taffy like it was nothing, the last time I’d run into them. “Well, let’s make a game out of it,” I said. “You and your friends chase down these ponies, one at a time, while Thirty and I convince the rest of them to stay here and play by the rules. If you can eat them all, and you’re still hungry… well, you get the two of us. Otherwise, you show us the way back to Ponyville.” “I don’t think I like this game,” said one of the clones. “It’ll be fun!” I said. “You can go first.” “What?” she backed up, looking scared. “The next pony to complain about the game goes second,” I said, to the rest of the clones. “Hah,” said the teenaged dragon. “Fume! Clump! Wake up! It’s dinner time!” The last bit in a cute little sing-song voice. The first pony went to Garble. That’s the red one. I don’t remember when I learned his name; I think one of his friends said it at some point. Anyway, Garble leapt after her as soon as she started to run, and she didn’t even get out of sight of the others before he landed on her back and took her down. He sank his teeth into her neck, and she squealed briefly, and that was it. He held her down for a few more seconds while the body shook in its death throes, then stood up. “Next?” “Uh uh uh!” I said. “You’ve got to eat her, or the game’s over, and we win.” “Oh, right,” he said, laughing and kneeling down over the corpse. “Dinnertime!” The other clones watched in horror as he ate their herdmate, bones and all. It didn’t take long – he was methodical, and apparently really, really hungry. I’m not even going to pretend to know where the bulk of an entire pony body went once it was in his stomach – dragons are just magic like that. Every slurp, every wet tear, every snap of a bone, was like a lover’s caress. After he was done, I felt Thirty forcefully pull my tail down to cover myself. “You’re… dripping,” she said. I blushed and sat down quickly, squirming against the cold rock as it pressed into my nethers. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s okay, I remember what it’s like,” she said. “I’m kind of jealous that I didn’t get it. To me this is just…” she sighed and shook her head. “Necessary.” “Convenient, at least,” I said. “Don’t worry, dragons go right to sleep once they’re full. If they actually follow through on their side of the deal, that’s just a bonus.” The second clone – she’d been the first to whimper as we watched the first get eaten – went to Fume. That’s the purple one with an overbite. She managed to dodge his attack, and turned and reared up, kicking him in the face with a forehoof. The other dragons laughed as he recoiled, and she kicked him again. “Stop it!” he hissed, swiping with a claw and spinning her to the ground, her blood arcing across the nearby trees. She tried to stand up, but he pinned her down with a foot, digging his claws into the small of her back, and then took one of her forelegs in his hand and just ripped it off. It took him several tries. At least she bled out before he finished eating it, and didn’t have to suffer any more after that. He was a pretty messy eater. “I really don’t like this game,” said one of the remaining clones. “It’s the best way to get most of us home,” I said with a sigh, then smiled at her. “Thanks for volunteering!” “What? No!” The third dragon – the big brown one, Clump – lumbered towards her. She danced back out of range. He continued to slowly advance on her. She panicked, and turned to run. He opened his mouth, and spat a ball of sticky flaming goop, that splattered across her hindquarters. She shrieked and ran off in a total panic, and Clump continued to follow her, tracking her by the trail of smoke. He came back a few minutes later, licking his lips. “Got her,” he said. “So,” I said. “You boys full yet?” Garble laughed. “Not even close.” Fume was the first to drop out, after only three ponies. “Sorry, boss,” he said, as he picked at the messy remains of the third pony – some offal he’d left for last, and her skull and ribcage. “I haven’t been this full in, like, ever.” “We’re not done yet,” Garble said. “Clump, you’ve still got some in you, right?” The brown dragon smiled, and patted his tummy, then motioned to the clones for one of them to volunteer to fill it next. By this point they’d gotten wise, and all of them stayed quiet. “Okay, we’ll use the alternate method to pick,” I said. “Eenie Meenie Minie Moe…” Garble managed to wolf down five ponies before he was too stuffed to move. “Fuck. Me,” he said, collapsing next to the half-eaten corpse of the fifth. I really, really wanted to take him up on it, but Thirty gave me a look. “It’s up to you, Clump,” I said. “There’s still five ponies left. Think you can eat them all?” He nodded. But when I picked the next volunteer, he just sat there as she ran off. He let out a loud burp, and struggled to get to his feet, then collapsed. “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” I said with a smirk. “Okay, boys, time to pay up.” Clump reached out and grabbed one of the clones, who hadn’t been picked, by the leg. “Hey! Let her go!” I said, as she struggled and kicked at him. He ignored both of us, pulling her into a tight embrace, and just held her to his chest as he ate her alive, starting from her head. She, um. She wasn’t actually alive for most of it. I mean, he was chewing. “See? He’s still hungry,” Garble said, grinning. “He’s insatiable. You might as well give up now.” “He’s too full to even move!” I said. “If he can’t catch them, then he’s done. Pay up! Tell us how we get back to Ponyville!” Garble laughed. “Fine, fine, I’ll tell you. If… you give me a kiss.” Fume and Clump laughed as he made kissy faces at me. Thirty grabbed my tail as I rose to go take him up on his offer. “Don’t!” she said around the tail-hairs. “Ith a twap!” “But Thiiiirty!” She blinked. “Who?” I whipped my tail out of her reach while she was confused. “That’s my name for you!” I said, as I carefully circled around Clump, not wanting to become his next meal by getting in arm’s reach. “I’m Lyra One, the one who ran off is Number Two, and you’re Thirty. I think it should have been Thirty Three, technically,” I said, pushing my way past the three clones left in the clearing. “But who’s counting? Maybe it’s a nickname.” Then I was at Garble’s side, as he lay in the dirt, stuffed to the gills. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Thirty wince as I leaned down to put my muzzle in reach of his jaws. He grinned at me, and his hand shot up and grabbed the back of my head. My heart raced. I let him pull me forwards… and we kissed. His claws combed through my mane as he tightened his grip on it, and my tongue slipped past his lips to lick over his giant fangs. They tasted like blood. Some of it was mine, since they were pretty sharp. Then his teeth opened a crack, and his tongue slipped into my mouth. I moaned as it squirmed around inside me, and then I was rolling him over onto his back, and straddling him, running my hooves over his scales as we continued to kiss. He was the one who broke it off, pulling his head back and panting. “Fuck me,” he said. “You are one crazy pony.” “I want to kill you,” I told him, breathlessly, my hooves sliding up to the thick muscles of his neck, taut under his scales. “I would orgasm so hard if I could just feel you die beneath my hooves,” I panted. “You nightmare-spawned monster.” “Good luck with that,” he said, running his claws gently down my back. I moaned, and threw my head back, grinding my belly against his. I felt something emerge beneath me – something long and hard and warm, and covered in little flexible spikes. His penis. I’m talking about his penis. Oh, sorry. You looked like you were a little confused. Sorry! Yes, I know you know what a penis is! And yes, that was when I banged a dragon. He was nearly comatose and I was on top. I managed to slip him inside me easily enough, but the spikes sort of dug in when I tried to pull up, so all I could really do was tug on him, then flop myself down and drive him a little deeper with each thrust. He wasn’t really up to screwing me properly – I had to do most of the work – but I didn’t care. I had a dragon cock inside me. And when I couldn’t take anymore, and exploded in pleasure, he ran his claws down my sides, just hard enough to feel really, really good in the middle of an orgasm. I had to work at him a little longer to get him to get off, but there was no way I was getting off him before that. Those stupid spikes, you know? Garble fell asleep afterwards, but Fume pointed us in the right direction. I think he wasn’t sure whether or not he was supposed to double-cross us, and with both his friends incapacitated he decided to play it safe. Or maybe he’s actually an honorable drake. …yeah, he was probably just confused.
Over the River and Through the WoodsBy that point, the sun was rising, and it was like night and day. Most of the more dangerous predators went to sleep during the day, and the ridiculously murderous plants were all brightly colored and visible. I still wouldn’t let your foals wander around in it, but the Everfree Forest during the day is… manageable. We met up with the clone who’d escaped from Clump, and even caught up to the one who’d sprained her ankle, since we were heading back the way we’d come. After half an hour, we reached the river, and from there it was just a matter of following it downstream until we got to Froggy Bottom Bog. There was supposed to be a hydra living there, but we didn’t run into it. Number Two and Twilight Sparkle caught up to us in one of the open fields outside the forest, before we got to town. Twilight scrunched her nose up a bit as she looked at the seven of us. “Where are the rest of the clones?” she asked. “Dead,” Thirty said. “This was as many as we could save.” Twilight stepped forwards and slapped her, hard. “You idiots! What were you thinking travelling through the Everfree Forest at night!” “We were thinking that the mirror pool couldn’t be that far from Ponyville, if you had to put a giant rock on top of it to keep ponies out,” I said. “But it turns out that it takes a really, really long time to find Ponyville if you walk in the opposite direction.” Twilight turned to look at me, and sniffed. “And why do you smell like dragon semen?” I raised an eyebrow, and grinned. “Do you really want me to answer that?” “But – what about you and Spike?” “Spike’s Lyra’s,” I said. “I’m not Lyra. But I’ll get you Lyra back. Soon.” Thirty started to explain. “We made a bunch of clones so that –“ Twilight interrupted. “I know, the other Lyra filled me in on the details. You’re sure that the next clone from the pool will be the real Lyra?” “Well… no?” I said. “There’s no way to be sure... but I think she can pull it off.” Twilight nodded. “And the rest of you are ready to go back to the pool?” “Oh yes, please!” said one of the clones. “I don’t want to get eaten by a monster! It really doesn’t seem fun at all!” It only took a few seconds for Twilight to zap the mindless clones. When she turned her horn on me, I held up a hoof. “Wait!” I said. “Not me! You need me to make the clone that the real Lyra will be in!” “No, do it,” Number Two said. “Zap her. You can clone any of us, and she’s a complete psychopath.” “It’s not my fault!” I said. “I’m only what you made me, Twilight.” “I made you as close to Lyra as I could,” Twilight said, keeping her horn charged. “From what your duplicate said, that was a terrible mistake. Lyra may have been a little obsessed with death and dragons, but she was never a murderer!” “Yes! Lyra isn’t a murderer!” I shouted. I knew that I probably should have been making excuses and trying to de-escalate the situation, but I was just so tired and angry and I didn’t think that anything I said was going to make any difference in what Twilight did since she’d already decided I was a villain. “So if I am, it’s all your fault! You and your stupid Reforming Spell!” She tried to zap me, at that point, but I saw the slight movement as she lowered her head to aim her horn, and that was enough warning to dodge. Then I turned and ran, putting Luna’s lessons in evasive maneuvering to good use – her next two shots went wide as well. By then, I’d made it to the edge of the forest, and vanished into the undergrowth. I expected her to be right on my tail, but the trees and bushes would give concealment and cover, and a slight hope of getting away. It turned out that she wasn’t even chasing me. She’d been distracted. === “Cloud Kicker, what are you doing here?” Twilight asked. “I just saw you with a couple of changelings, and wondered if they’d be interested in coming over to a private party at my place,” she replied, draping her front hooves over the edge of her napping-cloud. “We’re not changelings,” Thirty told her. “We’re clones from the mirror pool.” “Shh!” Twilight hissed, but it was too late. Cloud was already swooping down and standing very close to Thirty, virtually nose to nose. “Really? Oh wow! I’ve heard stories, but I was never able to find it… can you imagine the fun I could have with a few more of me?” “You know why that’s a terrible idea,” Twilight said. “Pinkie Pie’s clones almost destroyed Ponyville.” Cloud Kicker waved a wing at the princess. “Please! At best they annoyed Ponyville. And I’d only make one.” “You said ‘a few’,” Twilight pointed out. “Since you’re so concerned, I’ll make one, okay? Just tell me where to find it!” “You’ll make none!” Twilight said. “Just go home, and forget all about this. The mirror pool isn’t a toy, and neither are the clones it makes!” “Fine,” the pegasus said, taking to the air. “Party pooper.” She stuck her tongue out and made a rude noise as she flew off. “Now what do I do about you two?” Twilight asked, turning on the clones. She really should have remembered to come chase me – or at least paid attention to which way Cloud Kicker was flying. I was still racing through the forest at top speed when the pegasus landed in front of me with a loud crash and a jaunty grin. I had no idea what had just happened, so I assumed she was working with Twilight to catch me. Since most of my combat training was as a bat pony, my panicked reaction was to rear up and try to stab her with my spear… only I didn’t have a spear, so I just sort of kicked at her with my forehooves. She caught one of them in her teeth, and flipped me onto my back, pinning me to the leafy ground. “Where is it?” she asked. I stared at her. “What?” “The mirror pool. Where is it.” “I don’t know,” I said, still a bit confused. “It was night, and we were totally lost after leaving it. I guess you could just look for that weird patch of brambles? It’s in the middle of those.” Cloud Kicker snorted. “’The twistiest of vines’. Yeah, I checked there years ago. Nothing there but a giant rock.” “It’s under the rock,” I said. “Was under the rock. We moved the rock to get out.” “Oh,” she said, then grinned, and gave me a kiss. “Thanks!” I think you can see where this is going.
Through the Looking GlassThe first thing I remember was panicking, as the last of my memories washed away when I emerged from the pool. They’d tricked me! I didn’t know who, or how, but somehow that thought alone survived the transition, probably by virtue of being formed in the middle of the memory wipe. “Yeah, I’m a cutie all right,” came a voice from in front of me, and I snapped my gaze over to see who was talking. Pegasus, a middle-aged mare, light blue-or-maybe-purple with a yellow mane. Cutie mark of a sun and clouds. She was circling around me, staring me up and down like I was a piece of meat. I looked back at myself, and saw that I was her twin. There was a sort of mental spark, and I suddenly realized that my purpose in life was to serve her, sexually. “Oh,” I said. “I’m some sort of magical construct. I guess that explains why I can’t remember anything.” “Yeah,” she said. “So you have to do what I say. So…” she brushed her wing down my back, gently tickling me with the feathers, and smiled as my tail raised of its own accord. “What do you say we go back to my place, and engage in a little self-love?” I turned and grabbed the leading edge of her wing in my teeth, nibbling a bit on the coverts, and reached up to stroke along her jawline with a hoof. “Mmm.” “Is that a yes?” she asked, spreading her wing farther to present it to my attentions, with a dreamy look on her face. I released it, and gave her a kiss. It was a pretty long kiss, with quite a bit of tongue. After it was finally over, I gave her a nuzzle, and said, “No, that was a yes.” Then we both giggled. It’s hard to describe how I felt as the two of us made our way up the stairs, flirting and teasing and occasionally stopping to make out. It was like – my purpose was simple, and I was doing it well, and liking it, and it promised to be even more enjoyable in the future. So I was happy. There was nothing at all wrong with my life. Then we got to the top of the stairs, and I saw that we were surrounded by brambles, with a thick canopy of vine-strangled branches overhead to make it so we couldn’t just fly out. “The exit’s this way,” Cloud Kicker said, prancing over towards one edge of the small clearing, making sure to give me a good view. “It’s hard to see, but not that hard to crawl through. Just remember to keep your wings closed!” The opening was small, and surrounded by twisty thorny vines on all sides – we’d have to crawl and would probably get a little scratched up anyways. But the thorns weren’t as sharp as they looked, so our hide mostly protected us. Cloud Kicker ordered me to go first to clear the way, but it didn’t take long for me to realize her true agenda. When she ‘accidentally’ bumped her muzzle under my tail and started licking, well… it was a nice distraction from the thorns. She pushed me to keep moving, after a few seconds, but managed to keep up. I was hardly crawling at full speed with that distraction. But just as we finally came to the exit, the way was blocked by a young, mint-colored unicorn, who looked at me in a bit of a panic. “Cloud Kicker?” she said. “I hope you didn’t use the mirror pool yet. I forgot to tell you something really important.” “I think it worked out fine,” I said, with a smile as the tongue behind me switched to a more precise probing at my most sensitive spots, now that we’d stopped for a bit. “How is she supposed to use me? The night is young.” “It’s still morning,” came Cloud Kicker’s voice from behind me, and the unicorn in front of me paled. “No! No no no no no!” she said, grabbing my face with her hooves. “You’re not Lyra. Tell me you’re not Lyra!” So I kissed her. I was made for sex, after all. And Cloud Kicker’s always up for a threesome, so we held the unicorn down – Cloud called her Lyra – and made her squeal and moan, and squirm around in pleasure, right there in the forest. “I’m going to cast a spell on you,” Lyra said to me, afterwards. “And then I’ll need you to answer some questions.” “I’m not sure I should let you,” I told her. “You’re not my master.” “Oh, knock yourself out,” Cloud said, waving a wing dismissively. “I can always make another.” So she did. And I remembered… everything. It was a bit overwhelming, and there was enough stress and worry and pain in it all that it completely ruined my good mood. Especially the last part. === “Nine hundred eighty seven thousand six hundred and twenty eight dead pony souls in the pool, nine hundred eighty seven thousand six hundred and twenty eight dead pony souls… let one out to run around, nine hundred eight seven thousand six hundred and twenty seven dead pony souls in the pool!” “I already told you I give up!” the demon screamed in my ears, as I floated in the pool, near the gate. “Stop singing already!” I wasn’t about to stop now, though. Not while it was working! Honestly, I probably wasn’t going to make it all the way to zero, even if the gate continued to stubbornly refuse to open after the earlier flood of activity. “Nine hundred eighty seven thousand six hundred and twenty seven dead pony soul in the pool…” The water shifted around me, and I sang louder momentarily, thinking that the demon was up to something, but then I felt the warmth on my back as the surface of the pool started to glow, and a hoof reached down into the water. I took it, and it pulled me out. But as the bright surface started to make its way down my leg, I got a glimpse out into the cavern and saw who it was, that was using the pool. It was Cloud Kicker’s face, concentrating on the words as she chanted something that I couldn’t hear. Then everything was light, and agony, as the magic burned away at my body and my identity until I couldn’t hold on to my memories anymore, and let them slip away…
Failure to CopeI curled up and cried, wrapping my feathery wings around myself. I wasn’t a magical construct at all. My life wasn’t a simple matter of following Cloud Kicker’s orders and enjoying myself in carnal pleasures. I was a real pony, with responsibilities and friends and consequences to my actions, and it was just too much to take in all at once without screaming in anguish. “What did you do to her?!” Cloud Kicker asked. “I don’t know!” Lyra said. Not Lyra. A Lyra-clone. A crazy psycho Lyra clone who’d already killed dozens of ponies, because even if the clones weren’t really the ponies they looked like, they were flesh and blood and had a mind and a spirit and what else do you want? And meanwhile, Twilight and the other two surviving clones were back in Ponyville talking about the magical theory behind the pool, planning to go make a clone at sunset, which was hours and hours from now. “None of the others reacted this way,” not-Lyra said. “Maybe it’s because she looks like you?” “No,” I said, my eyes still squinted shut from the tears. “It’s because I’m the real one, and it’s going to be so much work. I thought I could just exist as Cloud Kicker’s plaything, and that would be so much simpler…” “The real what?” Cloud Kicker asked. “I’m the real Lyra,” I said, rolling onto my belly and turning my head to face her. “So I can’t be your sex slave. I have to go home and somehow tell Bon Bon about all this, and explain why I’m apparently a pegasus now… oh this is awful! I don’t know the first thing about being a pegasus! How can I even play a lyre without magic? I know they were designed to be played with your wings but I never had the right sort of wings to try that, even as a batpony!” “I’m lost,” Cloud Kicker said. “I think I’m going to head home, and you two can sort this out. If either one of you wants to be my sex slave, even if it’s just for the night or whatever, well – you know where to find me.” She grinned. I smiled back, weakly, and she flew off. “You’re right,” not-Lyra said. “This is terrible. I can’t be a pegasus. You should just… leave town. I’ll tell Twilight I’m the real Lyra, and take over for you. She used a Reforming Spell to give me the right personality and everything –“ “You’re a crazy psycho,” I reminded her. “I haven’t killed anypony real!” she protested. “The constructs don’t count!” “I don’t understand why you would think that,” I said. “I was talking with the demon in the well about what exactly it was, and it’s not really a demon at all. It’s just an amalgam of all the ponies that were absorbed into the well, and stayed there too long to retain their own identity. When the gate opens, one of them leaves for a while. Sometimes they never come back. There’s no time limit.” “But they’re just fakes,” not-Lyra said. “Copies.” I shook my head. “Even if they were, you shouldn’t kill them!” “I didn’t have any choice! The dragons would have killed us all!” “No, they would have killed you first, and most of the clones would have gotten away,” I said. “But that’s not even who I’m thinking of. It was the first clone you made. The one you murdered. Yes, there was a dream where I thought about doing something crazy like that to a magical construct because she ‘wasn’t a pony’, but I didn’t follow through on it, and I certainly didn’t enjoy it! Twilight tried to make you into a replacement for me, but she goofed.” “Shut up!” she said, standing up and glaring at me. “You know I’m right,” I said. “I’m just repeating back the things that you already thought. I have your memories, remember? I know that you know that you’re broken.” “Stop. Talking.” Her horn lit up, and I wondered what she was going to try to shoot at me. She didn’t know the spell to send ponies into the mirror pool, and I wasn’t really a strong enough caster to do anything else effective. Also, everypony knows that you don’t try to cast on a hostile target inside twenty feet. They can just jump on you and whack your horn, and not only will you lose the spell, you’ll get a really nasty headache and not be able to cast for a while. I guess she just wasn’t thinking. She certainly wasn’t thinking anything coherent after I jumped on her and whacked her horn. I pinned her down, and we wrestled for a bit. I was hoping that I could hold her down until she calmed down enough that we could go talk to Twilight and sort this all out without any more drama. I’d had my cry, and she’d had her temper tantrum, so we should all be able to talk this out like competent adults. Unfortunately, she was trying to kill me, and we weren’t really very good at wrestling – Luna had mostly had us learn weapon attacks, and a bit of hoof to hoof, in the short time that we’d spent in her Guard. In Cloud Kicker’s toned weather-pony pegasus body, I was a lot stronger than she was in her layabout unicorn body, but I didn’t know how to keep her pinned, so she kept breaking free and trying to kill me, and I’d have to stop her and hold her down and pin her again, and it was getting tiring. “Please, calm down!” I panted, as she squirmed out of my grip again. “Die, you self-righteous nag!” she screamed at me, and head-butted me in the chin. With her horn. It tore through the base of my jaw and shattered a bunch of teeth, and the pain was enough to make me gurgle out a scream and let go of her… and while I was trying to get ahold of myself she kicked me in the face, making it all hurt twice as much, and then reared up and stomped on my head. There was a crunch, and a moment of confusion… …and then I woke up in my living room, sprawled out on the floor next to the discarded bits of my Night Guard armor. Back in my own body – my real body, freed from concept space when the bat-pony transformation was finally cancelled by my death. Bon Bon was sitting on the couch, staring at me. She was not amused.
The Finer Points of Tentacle SexI haven’t actually had sex with a lot of things with tentacles, and certainly this was my first tentacle demon. Considering the danger, I can’t recommend it – everything turned out fine for me, but it was a close thing and I got very lucky! Otherwise… yes. It was good. The tentacles were firm, but soft, and changed shape to fill me completely, stretching me out just enough to hurt just enough to make it perfect. Like they could read my mind. And they came from everywhere, to stroke lightly over every part of my body at once, holding me tightly enough to let me squirm and struggle, but not escape. I opened my mouth to moan, and a tentacle flowed inside, playing with my tongue like a kiss, before thickening and pressing gradually into my throat. I jerked, and tried to cough it out, but it was too strong for me, and my lungs started to scream for air. As the ache worked its way through my body, the tentacle at my other end thrust faster and harder, peaking that pain as well. I shuddered uncontrollably as the certainty that I was about to die set me off, the waves of tingling pleasure surging through me, turning the pain and terror into a desperate joy… And then they kept me there, for minutes, because I didn’t actually need to breathe. My muscles and lungs were on fire, but it was a good pain… and when the forest of invisible tentacles surrounding me slithered away, leaving me in a small, air-filled pocket, it was pure bliss. I lay there bonelessly, gasping for air, twitching slightly, and convulsing around the last remaining tentacle, still thrusting into me, until there was an explosion of frost inside me, and then it softened and pulled out. The air was warm. The floor was soft and cool, and the walls were softly lit by an ambient blueish light. I was weak, aching, dripping with sweat and my own juices, and everything was right with the world. Sex is kind of creepy that way.
All’s Well that Ends“And that’s the whole story,” Lyra said, taking another sip of her milkshake as she sat at the table outside the café. Bon Bon and Rose were sitting with her, the former with a slight frown, the latter with the usual bemused smile she tended to hold while listening to one of Lyra’s stories. “Not-me had to know what had happened – the way the bat-pony spell disintegrates the old body is pretty distinctive – and no one’s seen hide of hair of her ever since. She probably just ran off into the Everfree. Maybe she’s dating Garble or something. “As for the other two clones… after Bon Bon finished yelling at me –“ “I never said I was done,” Bon Bon said. “Maybe I’m just resting up for the next session.” Lyra grinned, and took another sip of her milkshake. “When Bon Bon momentarily paused in her yelling at me, I went and found Twilight and explained what I’d figured out about how the mirror pool worked. She agreed that we should let Number Two and Thirty stay, if they wanted to. They just couldn’t stay here, in Ponyville, because it would be too confusing for everypony. Number Two shipped out to Vanhoover, waaay on the other side of the continent, and Thirty decided to try her luck in Canterlot.” “In the Night Guard?” Rose asked. “Oh, no,” Lyra said, laughing. “No, she isn’t a killer. She’s going to try to make it as a classical musician, since they did inherit my cutie mark and all of my training. She’s nowhere near as lazy as I am, so maybe she’ll be able to stand being in one of the big orchestral troupes.” “I suppose I’ll keep an eye out for her the next time we go to the opera,” Rose said. “But wait – if the mirror pool copies the cutie mark, and the bat-pony transformation doesn’t change it, shouldn’t you still have Cloud Kicker’s talent?” She turned to look at Lyra, and down at her flank, then raised an eyebrow at her as she noticed how the light sun dress Lyra was wearing obscured her hips. Bon Bon just continued to glower. “Um… no comment,” Lyra said. “Nice weather we’re having, don’t you think?”
