The Conversion Bureau - Most Faithful Student

Prologue: *Operation Nightfall*

Hours before dawn, a series of massive fireballs and conjured thunderbolts tore through the Conversion center.  The wards that should have stopped them had been completely disenchanted, with the physical sigils shattered and the base’s more ephemeral defenses simply dispelled.  The blast had leveled the chamber and reduced the alchemical serum it housed to harmless, magically inert ash and vapor, but had left both housing units – pony and ape – completely unharmed.

Only a mage could have controlled the flames, not to mention disenchant the protective spells surrounding the base.  It literally never occurred to Twilight that the perpetrator could have been anyone but a unicorn.

Sunset Shimmer – “Dawn Marisol,” according to the fake papers she'd used to get into the camp –  smirked as Celestia’s new most faithful sucker started to give orders reflecting that assumption, and watched Twilight direct her little ponies to find such a unicorn.  Well, she was half-right…

Sunset dropped her façade of being a stunned bystander when Twilight ordered her familiar to take a letter.  Sendfire was much quicker than a Twinned Tome for sending a message – a gout of flame dropping a letter in front of your eyes was harder to miss than a buzzing book – but it also required a dragon to exhale.  Sealing his mouth magically took care of that, and took only a fraction of her power.  Unfortunately, it required gestures and an incantation.

Twilight turned to the source and stared.

“Surprise,” Sunset said, before hurling a blast of red-hot electrical energy at her.

Twilight snarled, set all four of her hooves, and negated her spell in a shower of harmless motes of blue light – and again negated a second volley of electrical energy that Sunset had curveballed at her flank. She said “I don’t know what you think you’re doing or who you learned your tricks from, but –“

“-Celestia never told you?  That figures,” Sunset said, leveling her wand – a rod of copper as big as her thumb at its widest, grooved in a spiral pattern, ending in a blunt point.  “She never told me a damn thing about conversion when she taught me about magic.”

“You converted YOURSELF to THAT form?” Twilight said, eyes wide, pupils pinpricks.  She fired a thin, crimson beam from her horn.  Sunset grinned, and waved her hand – and suddenly, the ruins of the conversion chamber were full of a dense, greenish fog.

“Ask her about the Mirror of Reflected Worlds sometime,” Sunset said from somewhere within the miasma, before laughing.  “Would have made infiltration easier, if I hadn’t wrecked it.  But man - ripping open a hole in the in-between, and promising a cure for acquired thaumic poisoning syndrome through conversion?  That’s inspired.  She always could plot on her hooves.”

“Y-you’re lying!”  Twilight said – a mistake when charging through fog.  Sunset side-stepped it easily, then dismissed the fog and fired another jolt straight at Twilight’s cutie mark. Twilight let it burst and play against a shield of blue light.  “Celestia is loving and kind.  She would never plot murder on that scale, not even of –“

“See, now she’s even got you saying ‘not even humans,’” Sunset snarled.  “That ‘not even humans’ attitude is the problem.”

“Shut up!” Twilight snarled, pouring power into an enormous ball of fire.

Another of the would-be Converted stepped out from behind Twilight and leveled a platinum rod tipped with a diamond.  It fired a pulse of blue-white mist that caught and snuffed out part of the fireball, sending the rest of it veering wildly off course behind Sunset.  Sunset could feel the heat, but was relatively safe.

Twilight fell to her chestnuts, staring in shock.

“I didn’t start the fire, Twilight Sparkle,” Sunset said.  “I didn’t set the spells that blew your operation to kingdom come.  I was only buying time for the people who did.”

“Hi,” said a voice from above.  Twilight looked up and gasped.  Standing on a cloud was a woman in jeans and a tank top, one of the latest batch who had volunteered for conversion.  “Lemme introduce myself - Iris Kallistrate.  Stormcaller.  Human.”  She grinned, all canines, and Twilight shivered.  “Your friend with the red hair taught me how to throw lightning.  Cool, huh?”

Twilight stared at her.  “That’s – that’s impossible,” Twilight said.  “This is a trick, it has to be.  Humans can’t use magic.  Humans have never used magic.”

“One must not ignore the evidence in front of them, darling,” said the woman with the diamond-tipped rod – and that word, darling, somehow managed to be a more venomous insult than if she had called Twilight a moon-banished whoresfoal of Tirac.  She brushed a stray lock of black hair back under her violet silk shawl, then glowered at her.  “Prejudices about our species aside.”

“Karima here is the best damn enchantress I’ve ever met,” Sunset said, indicating the woman who had just spoken, “on two legs or four.  All you need to cast spells is the will, the wand, the word – and a soul, if I’m not mistaken?”

Twilight shook her head, teleporting backwards, away, in a blue-white flash.  She was shaking as she returned to physical space from the aether, her eyes wide with fear, her mind’s gears turning.  Stripping themselves, more like, Sunset thought – before banishing the thought.  Hopefully she would see reason.  That would make her job – ‘being X-Com with wands,’ as Ross put it - easier.

Sunset pointed her wand at her, her mouth a fanged snarl.  “Next time you send a friendship report, tell Celestia that Sunset Shimmer – and the human magi she taught - send their regards.  I can imagine it now – ‘Dear Princess Celestia, today I learned that the species you’re trying to destroy for being soulless abominations have always had souls, what’s up with that?’  Sincerely -”

“GUARDS!” Twilight screamed, her voice amplified with crackling magic.  A blue streak of a Pegasus immediately responded, a rainbow contrail in her wake.

“Fuck,”  Iris said.  “Calling a Code Flue, NOW!”

Three other strangers rose up from the confused huddle of the converted – one who looked like, and was, a cowgirl; an androgynous man in a black hoodie; and a redheaded woman in a pink t-shirt and khaki shorts.  The two women linked hands, closed eyes, and started chanting – and glowing with blue-white light.

Twilight snap-cast a rune of negation at them, lazily countered by Karima’s own rune, and then the six of them – and all of the other would-be converted in the field - vanished from the physical world and what was left of the conversion center, leaving Twilight and her friends to stare at the devastation and the empty field that had been full of humans mere seconds ago.