Great, I'm the New Bad Guy...

[Overlord's POV]

The Ponies had decided to stay one extra day and I wouldn't kick them out just yet. I was able to have several more conversations with Celestia and Luna, and even got to speak with some of the mane six, which was somewhat fun... aside from Fluttershy, who could barely get three words out at a time, and stuttered hard with each word. I stutter myself occasionally if I have too many things on my mind, but I was nowhere near as bad as her. Regardless, I just grit my teeth and waited for her to get out her side of the conversation, which went well once she could actually speak properly.

I did have to break up several near fights between Gnarl and different ponies, mostly being Applejack, Rainbow Dash, and, surprisingly, Twilight herself, though only twice with her. I suppose even Gnarl can only be hurled through a wall so many times before he stops trying to antagonize the thing that is throwing him through multiple walls. The only pony he didn't manage to antagonize was Fluttershy, who somehow managed to make him even more angry than Twilight by simply agreeing with him and/or putting a positive spin on anything he called/said to her. After I found him hopping up and down, frothing at the mouth, and using curse words that even I didn't know at her, I decided that enough was enough and put him under 'house arrest' for the remainder of the ponies stay.

And by 'house arrest', I mean that I had grabbed him by the neck, threw him into a dungeon cell, and told him that if I saw him again before the ponies left, Giblet would be the oldest living minion. I didn't even hear a peep from him after. But back to my guest's...

Luna, and later Rarity, had been interested in the forging process for the arms and armor of the tower. Luna wasn't aware of any forging method that made metal of such high quality, at such low weight, without any enchantments, Rarity was interested because of the coloration, texture and the odd way the metal would catch the light making waves of light and dark, even on a perfectly flat sheet. I had decided to refrain from telling them that part of the forging process involved using live minions. As in, live minions willingly jumping into the smelter as it melts the ore, thus evenly mixing the then dead minion into the metal which would then be beaten into the proper shape by Giblet or his assistants.

When she wasn't being harassed by Gnarl, Twilight had been either in my library or with Sarra down in her hive, asking her every question that she could think of about changelings, which Sarra mostly answered. Her excuse for not answering several questions was, "You can't just give away all of your secrets, you need some mystery to keep them interested!". The hive was down in the basement, behind the door that we had found a few months back. I had given it to her as an excuse to have her live in the tower as opposed to the badlands, where a majority of the changeling's still lived.

What? It would have been annoying to have to go out to the badlands just to get her opinion every time I wanted it.

Anyway, all in all my guests were having a good time. Aside from Celestia, who seemed to be a tad more jittery than yesterday, jumping at sudden movements and glaring at shadows as she walked past. I tried to ask her what was wrong but all I got was her apologizing, saying that she just had a bad dream last night. She seemed to be better after that, but I knew it was a lie and she was just as worried as before. But I let her have this one, if she didn't want to tell me then I wouldn't pry.

Just before they left, around three hours before sundown, I informed them that I would be headed down to the south west to deal with some amount of trouble in the villages in that area.

"Oh... But, wait, Isn't that near Arimaspi territory? Will you be alright?" Celestia asked with a concerned expression, turning back to face me while the others finished packing up the various small things they would be taking back with them.

"Arimaspi? Hmm... I don't think I've ever heard of anything with that name. What are they like Princess?" Fluttershy asked from where she was hovering, helping Rarity organize the sketches she had made for clothing after being hit by inspiration by my towers decoration.

"From the description I've been given, they seem to be large semi-bipedal cycloptic goats, with a love for gold and meat. Do you have anything to add to that assessment, Celestia?" I asked hoping to get a bit more information about the things I would be fighting soon. After all, like G.I. Joe said, knowing is half the battle.

"They are vile creatures, and in more ways than one." Luna said, beating Celestia to the punch. "They rarely bathe, endlessly war among themselves, will taunt and harass anything near their territory by flinging any number of disgusting items, and may mercy find you if you enter their territory. Only once have we have sent military forces into their territory, as an effort to help our griffin neighbors, and we shall never do so again." Luna said, getting a sad nod from Celestia

"What happened to the forces you sent?" I asked, forcing closed an annoying suitcase that Pinkie couldn't, eliciting a sheepish smile and slight blush of embarrassment from her.

"Around one week later we received reports of the Arimaspi... torturing them. In ways I don't feel comfortable speaking of... we couldn't save them from their torment, the most we could do was to put them out of their misery from a safe distance. And even then we lost several soldiers from stones and small bones hitting them at such speeds that they were gone before they hit the ground." Luna said, the discomfort clear on her face as the ponies around her gasped in horror.

"Oh, my! They sound, why they sound absolutely evil!" Rarity whisper-screamed as she fought fainting. The rest of the girls were either green in the face, angry, horrified, or some mix of the three. "You will be careful, won't you? I'd hate for anything bad to happen to you after you've been such a good friend and host."

I didn't say anything in return, simply walking away to let them finish packing before seeing them off. I made my way back to my throne thinking about what Luna had told me. I wasn't afraid, or particularly upset at what I had heard, If anything it made me a bit excited. This was something I was familiar with! Diplomacy was not really my forte, but killing violent creatures while getting some other things done was right up my alley!

"What has you so peppy?" Sarra asked me with a smile. She really did seem happier now, not to mention that her silly attempts to 'woo' me would finally stop, which would make her more focused on the task at hand in the long run. Sure, she would still be herself, silly, flirty, overblown, and just a touch full of herself, but that was what made her work and work well.

"In order of importance to me, or in sequence of events?" I asked, sitting in my throne as she got into my lap. I was still slightly uneasy with her being so close, as I don't like being touched, but I knew I would need to get used to it... "and it isn't so bad..."

"Yes." She simply responded, nuzzling my neck and causing my arm to almost automatically wrap around her. "She is officially my mistress now after all, it wouldn't do to let her slip and fall off of me..."

"Reverse order of importance then. Well first off, the ponies are leaving. While I don't dislike them, having them around is quite stressful." I said as I sighed into Sarra's long, soft hair. My throne might not let me actually relax, but this was still the most unwound I had been since they showed up. "For these past three days I've been afraid that something would happen, and it would put us back dramatically, or worse destroy us."

"The ponies? Destroy us? Ha! I doubt they could even get to the tower with the forces they have!" She snorted, bouncing in my lap slightly.

"I have no doubts that they would take losses, but as to us winning... well I have my doubts on that one." I told her, earning another giggling snort. "We would almost certainly lose, at least unless I can find/make a counter for the Elements of Harmony. One hit and the minions will abandon me, that will be that and they will go looking for a different Overlord, like Gorger the Overgoat, or heaven forbid, Tireck."

"Well then, I suppose we will just have to take them more seriously. What else?"

"I'm finally going to be getting off of my ass and doing something." I said getting several looks from around the room. I was notoriously lazy after all, not getting up even to sleep in a comfortable bed.

"Really? Now I've heard everything, what's next, you want to become king of Tartarus?" She said with a heaping helping of sarcasm.

"I will be the first to say that I'm one lazy bastard, but eventually doing nothing becomes boring, even to someone who doesn't really want to do anything. Plus, who knows? We might find the Blues around that area."

And that would be a rather welcome development, I was actually beginning to get a little worried about the little guys. Blues were notorious for being the most frail type of minion there was, one or two good swipes from anything bigger than they were and you would have a small blue corpse.

"Well, I'm glad to see that you have some active bones in your body, a good leader is an active one, and all that." She said as she began to slip off my lap... which I was only slightly disappointed by. "Oh, before I forget, I need you to come and see me down in the hive before you go stomping off to the mountain of doom. Take your time, I need to get it set up anyway." And with a little wiggle, she disappeared down the stairs.

I stayed in my throne for a few more minutes as minions brought me some of the more official, important documents that needed my signature. Of course, I made sure to read them all very thoroughly as I didn't want to risk Gnarl tricking me into signing anything that would end up biting me in the ass, like the one time he tried to make it perfectly legal for any random minion to walk into any random home, and destroy the place.

I did however, in an attempt to please him/shut him up, let Gnarl 'talk me into' instating a few new laws concerning the dead, such as making it not only legal but mandatory for all dead in the domain to be used in some fashion. The Sheeple would be used as food for the Diamond Dogs, and they for the minions, and the minions... were the dark souls kind of immortal, where you could be killed but otherwise can't die. Kind of made the point moot for them as they didn't leave corpses behind.

Once I was tired of signing things, like adjusting the price of wheat and wheat byproducts, I got up and went down to my lab. The lab that Twilight had been expressly forbidden from entering, yet I knew she had gone down there as everything was perfectly ordered when I was next there. The lab that I had been using to try and figure out cross-dimensional/trans-universal travel in. And after that, the lab that I was trying to make a new breed of minion in.

I had figured out how cross-dimensional/trans-universal travel might work, in theory, and it wasn't even that difficult given what little I know about physics. The problem was the amount of energy it would take to send me back.

The universe I was currently in.

That's how much energy it would take to send me back. I would need to transmute all of the matter in this universe, including the matter of my own current body, into raw magical energy just to send me back to my home universe. Not even earth, there was no way for anything other than a computer to pinpoint where I would end up, and any computer would be consumed by the spell. So not only would I have no guarantee that I would even be on my own planet, or a planet in general, but I would have around three seconds to find and jump into my body, assuming it's even still there, before I would fade away into nothingness.

In short, there was no way for me to get back... but... I might be able to at least say goodbye. The reason it took so very much energy to send me anywhere was two fold, one reason worse than the other. Reason one was that the universe I was trying to get to had no natural magic in it, which meant that a portion of the energy would need to be used to stabilize reality in the area of the return. We wouldn't want to go ripping any holes in reality, letting all kinds of nasty things in now would we? Reason two, the much more troublesome one, was that I was alive and had memories. Transporting mass was as easy as moving air by comparison, as memories and life were several magnitudes harder to move without... 'bleaching' them, for lack of a better term. If done carelessly, you could end up an empty husk, or an undead monstrosity.

But a letter... a letter was small, dead, and had no memories in it. By my estimates it would take about forty tons of iron worth of matter to send a letter, and hopefully with just enough accuracy as well. It had taken me... several dozen tries to get it just right, and even now... How are you supposed to tell your family that your trapped in a different universe, that you're okay, but that there is no way for you to ever get back to them? That you had been able to make a home for yourself, even make a (sort of) family? I suppose that in the end, there is no right way, just a few less terrible ways.

I looked around the Lab at the different lifeforce's scattered around the room, each in a different state of being. My early attempts at altering lifeforce consisted of binding two or more colors together, and, sadly, while they were stable it wasn't possible to form any minions out of it. Then I tried strengthening the lifeforce by binding more of one color together and found that while it could produce more powerful minions, the cost/benefit ratio was a tad to high in my opinion as it made one minion with the strength of five (the limit of the bonding process before a rather large explosion happened), but not much else. Possibly useful for projectile type minions like the Reds or Blues, but in the case of melee combat, more was better. So in the long run, there was little I could do to alter the minions unless I discovered something.

Like the fact that the reason the minions were dumb in the first place was tied to either bad grammar or purposeful negligence in the spell lattice that crafted the minions from lifeforce. Which I was in the process of slowly altering.

Anyway, I grabbed the final draft of my goodbye letter and headed down to the forge to send it. This was one of the only times I had outright taken the materials needed for something that I wanted to do, but with how important it was to me... I honestly didn't care, family was what mattered to me right now.

[Sarra's POV]

Everything was almost ready down in the hive's main chamber, all I needed now was Nobody and then I would finally be able to do it! Ohh, this was so exciting!

He was up in the forge, feeling more than a little melancholy, and from what I could sense he was trying some weird type of teleport, but I couldn't tell where it was supposed to go... it also seemed like it was using a stupid amount of energy. What was he even doing? Well, I would know soon anyway, and I trusted him to not destroy the tower/world through carelessness. Besides, he tried/practiced all kinds of odd spells, often building off of what I had teached him during our last session... speaking of, I realized that not only was I running out of things to teach him, but lately I was the one who was doing most of the learning!

I made my way up to the forge, finding Nobody standing alone in an extremely large empty room. There was a large (yet smaller than I first sensed) amount of energy currently being crushed down to smaller than a pin head, for a moment I was afraid that it would suddenly destabilize and end up leaving a very large crater, before it mysteriously vanished without a trace.

Nobody turned to me, and for a few moments I forgot why I had come up to find him. My mate was feeling pain, pain from the acceptance of loss, loneliness, and general grief. I simply held him while he breathed heavily, trying to calm himself.

The grief and pain subsided very quickly yet he still held onto me, making me happy to know that he found comfort in my presence. "Thank you." was all he said as he let me go. I grabbed his hand with one of my hooves and began to lead him down to my- no our hive, explaining what was going on as we went.

"I want to make our union official, by changeling standards, and that will need us to preform an old ritual." I explained as we went down the stairs.

"Ritual? Is it dangerous? Are ther any side effects?" He asked in a curious and not at all afraid tone.

"Good, I really want this to happen, and him being suspicious would only make it harder." I thought, very thankful of his trust. "It's nothing dangerous, in fact it only has benefits as far as anyone has been able to tell in the last three thousand years. It is a very important part of changeling culture, passed down from one queen to her daughter since it's first use, and It means so much to me for you to do this!"

"Big deal, huh? Is this the changeling equivalent of marriage or something?" He asked without sarcasm.

"Would you say no if it was?" I asked as we stopped on a landing, feeling slightly nervous for all of a second.

"No."

We kept walking, though now I had a grin that split my face like Nobody split heads and a bit more pip in my step.

As we entered the main chamber of the hive I told him " Just stand in that circle there, I'll be able to take care of the rest!" As he did so I powered up the runes scattered about the room, filling them to bursting with the very energy that he had given me, taking my spot opposite him. "Now, try not to resist, just let it happen, and it will be over before you know it!"

The energy suddenly peaked before he could say anything, sparking between the two of us. My physical eyes stopped working as we were linked, mind, body, and soul, once more for me and for the first time for him, with the hive. There was some resistance from Nobody, but that was to be expected from a mind that was unused to the feeling of a hive mind, if anything he was actively trying to help the process of the joining and it was his instinctual animal brain that was resisting.

My ethereal body within the hive mind practically galloped to the new connection in progress, the winding tunnels of the ethereal hive minds representation seeming to lead up, until I found a small opening, one that was just forming, and waited there until it was large enough for me to fit through.

Every room, every tunnel, every aspect of the hive minds landscape was formed from the minds and emotional ranges of those within it, most being small, cozy bedrooms full of pictures of loved ones, rivals, friends, and a few (such as myself) being large multi room structures with fine furniture and stain glass windows. What I found was... incredible.

Sky, a field, mountains. I could tell that this wasn't all Nobody, and as I looked around I realized what had happened. The minions had been dragged into the hive mind as well! Though some were smarter than others, as shown by the small, poorly fashioned and run down shacks that dotted the landscape, for the most part the 'above ground' was constantly in a chaotic state, shifting as the minions attention shifted. One spot would be choked with overgrowth and filth before burning away as fiery volcanoes erupted from beneath them, only to cool rapidly and be used as a battleground of some sort. And over all of it, a hurricane circled flashing lightning and rain down everywhere, only adding to the chaos.

And standing right in the eye of the storm, tall and proud, was Nobody, quietly watching his surroundings. The ground he was standing on seemed to be constantly shifting between small yet beautiful flowers and the same chaotic ground that the minions walked on. He saw me standing at the crest of the hill the 'entrance' to the hive mind was at, and it was as though something had kicked the storm into overdrive. Then, as our minds became more in sync, I understood everything about his... 'odd' emotions. It wasn't that he didn't feel, or even that his emotions were just fundamentally different, it was that he felt so strongly that his mind couldn't actually handle it on it's own.

In an effort to protect itself, his brain had basically locked a part of itself away.

I moved to him and just embraced him in the eye of the storm of his emotions. "Well, at least we'll never go hungry again with a sours of emotion like this." I whispered to him with a bit of a giggle.

"I'm just going to let you know right now, there are some things in my head that you would probably be happier not knowing, but I won't stop you from trying to look if you really want to." He rumbled to me. I nodded my head, there would be time to look through his memories and tease him mercilessly about his past experiences later, for now...

We came back to our physical selves, embracing in the main chamber of our hive. Nobody's legs buckled slightly as he came back to his senses along with a few new ones. "It's okay, just take your time. It dose take some getting used to." I whispered to him while helping to let him sink down to the ground, as I knew he was basically having the equivalent of a slight hangover without the thirst.

We spent the next hour cuddling on the floor of the main chamber.

[Overlord's POV]

After my head stopped pounding and my eyes had stopped trying to jump out of my skull (and I knew I needed to stop cuddling with Sarra to see the ponies off), we both got up and began moving up to the front gate, Sarra practically glued to my side.

The ponies were waiting for us at the ground entrance to the tower, fully packed and ready to go. They all looked happy to see us coming to say goodbye, though a few of their smiles were just a tad bit to sly to just be 'happy to see you' smiles.

After a few more goodbye's, as well as a promise to visit Suger Cube Corner if I was ever in Ponyville and an invitation to the next Grand Galloping Galla, they began their journey home. My tower and I had actually survived first contact with the little trouble mak- uh, I mean, the 'accident prone equines'. Yes, let's go with that one.

"Finally they're gone! I don't mind a good dungeon cell, but it does get stuffy every now and then!" Gnarl said from beside us.

And just like that, all of the good feelings we had been having shriveled up and died.

"Prepare the minions Gnarl," I growled at him "We march south tomorrow."

"Of course, sire! Right away!" he said with a bow before scampering off.

"Welp, first a small rest, then it will be time to go to work." were my last thoughts before Sarra and I went back down to our hive.