A Purple Pony Princess's Problems on Planet Popstar

Chapters

Chapter I: Royal Rumble
Chapter II: Revenge of the King
Chapter III: Enemies Made Acquaintances
Chapter IV: An Equestrian Interlude
Chapter V: Scuffle in the Sky
Chapter VI: Havoc Aboard the Halberd
Chapter VII: Friends Under the Setting Sun
Chapter VIII: The Meta-Knights Explained
Chapter IX: Acquaintances Made Friends
Chapter X: The Nightmare
Chapter XII: A Nightmare's Aftermath
Chapter XIII: A Thorny Situation
Chapter XIV: In the Absence of Magic
Chapter XV: A Celestial Squabble
Chapter XVI: Floria, the Wooded World
Chapter XVII: Aquarius, the Water World
Chapter XVIII: Skyhigh, the Center of the Storm
Chapter XIX: Hotbeat, the Volcanic Venture
Chapter XX: Cavius, the Calamitous Cavern
Chapter XXI: Mekkai, the City in the Sky
Chapter XXII: Halfmoon, the Celestial Spheres
Chapter XXIII: Milky Way Wishes
Chapter XXIV: What Wishes Wrought
Chapter XXV: The Encroaching Darkness
Chapter XXVI: Yellowed Grass
Chapter XXVII: Trees of Green
Chapter XXIX: Indigo Ice
Chapter XXX: Red Soil
Chapter XXXI: Orange Sunsets
Chapter XXXII: Storming the Violet Castle
Chapter XXXIII: The Rainbow Returned
Chapter XXXIV: Five
Chapter XXXV: Four
Chapter XXXVI: Three
Prologue: On Mirrors and the Breaking Thereof
Chapter XI: The Hero of Dreamland
Chapter XXVIII: Ocean Blue

Chapter I: Royal Rumble

By the time Twilight had regained consciousness, the sun had risen, chased the triplet moons from the sky, and brilliantly illuminated the arches. They were as beautiful as they were unsettling. With a great deal of effort, she tore her flabbergasted stare from the sky and focused on properly analyzing her situation. She was sitting on a cloud, something she’d definitely have to get more used to with her new wings. Spike seemed to be awake, though he was on the verge of dozing off any minute now. The thief was asleep, softly breathing on the mattress-like cloud.

“Spike?” Twilight asked, breaching the silence.

Spike’s eyes shot open, the idea of sleeping suddenly forgotten. “Twilight! You’re up!” He launched forward, gripping her in a tight hug. “Are you alright?”

She happily returned the embrace. “I’m fine, Spike. How long was I out?”

Spike yawned. “A few hours, I think? It was nighttime when we got here.”

Twilight looked around, her gaze lingering for a moment on the demolished remains of the Mirror. “Where…where is here, anyway?” she pondered rhetorically.

Spike shrugged. “I dunno. Sunset there didn’t seem to know, either.”

The princess glanced down at the sleeping mare. “Her name’s Sunset?”

Spike nodded with another yawn. “All I was able to get out of her when she was awake was that her name is Sunset Shimmer.”

Twilight gave her assistant a warm smile. “Don’t worry, Spike, I’m sure we’ll learn more about her later.”

Spike nodded again, his eyes drifting closed as he leaned more into Twilight’s embrace. “And I’ll help…”

After waiting a moment to make sure that Spike was asleep, Twilight levitated him into a more comfortable position with a sigh. He’d already had a long day helping her out with the Summit, but staying up watching Sunset must have been extra taxing. He deserved the rest. Twilight sent a sleeping spell Sunset’s way in the meantime to make sure she stayed napping until Spike woke up again as well; she wanted all three of them awake and alert before the questions started. Namely, figuring out where they were.

As she took in her surroundings once more, the panic finally started to set in for Twilight. This definitely wasn’t Equestria. Hay, with those arches in the sky, she doubted she was even on Equus anymore. Their way back looked like it was completely out of the question, thoroughly destroyed by its first use. She cringed. Using any sort of experimental spell, no matter how benign it may have seemed, in a room full of ancient, potentially unstable magical artifacts had been a terrible, terrible idea.

She started hyperventilating. This was by far the furthest she had ever been from home. Despite the open air, the world felt like it was pressing in on her from all sides. How could she even consider herself a princess if she had just up and vanished on the ponies she was supposed to be ruling over? Would she ever get to see her friends again? Clearly travel back to Equestria was possible, but how long would it take her to reverse-engineer the magic in the Mirror? Weeks? Months? Years? Decades? What if something threatened to destroy Equestria in that time? Without all of the Elements, her friends wouldn’t be able to stop that!

Her eyes widened. How could she forget about the Element of Magic? Where was it? Sunset had it when they went through the Mirror; maybe it was still in her saddlebags? Oh, what if it had fallen to the ground? Was it fragile? Could an Element of Harmony even break? If it did, even if she could get back home, how would she be any help-

Oh, Spike has it.

That panicky train of thought came to a screeching halt as she levitated the crown onto her head and applied a sticking charm for good measure. Placing a hoof over her chest, she followed the breathing technique that Cadance had taught her. It didn’t help much to calm her racing heart, but it did prevent her mental state from devolving into a full-blown panic attack. Enough so that she could calm herself further by actually taking stock of her situation and asking herself important questions.

Alright, what do I know? I’m not on Equus anymore, and I don’t have a way back. Right now, I need to focus on securing food, water, and shelter for myself, Spike, and Sunset. Once those basic needs are met, I can start working on a way back home. Who do I have access to?

Well, there’s myself. Alicorn princess, wielder of the Element of Magic. Good start. Spike is young, but him being a fire-breathing dragon will be helpful if we get into a sticky situation. Sunset seems rather powerful, but I’ll have to keep an eye on her. I don’t know what her plans are.

Location? We’re… she looked down, a kilometer or so up. Not too far to teleport the three of us. Does the surface look promising?

She scanned the ground, looking for anything that stood out in the topography. It seemed pleasant enough. A large grassy field, criss-crossed with various rivers and dotted by what seemed like houses, stretched out for kilometers on end. A lush, green forest wrapped around most of it, reaching all the way out to the horizon. The other horizon held what looked like an ocean the aforementioned rivers all dumped into, the field comfortably transitioning into shoreline. What really caught her eye, though, was the mountain chain rounding out the field’s borders. The peaks were all rather tall, several reaching above the clouds. One even looked like a building had been built on top of it. In fact, Twilight realized, said building appeared to be a castle!

Castles meant government, government meant structure, and structure meant that Twilight could get some form of security. A plan rapidly began to form in her head as she pondered the possibilities, and with a pop, the three forms on the cloud disappeared as she teleported them to the ground below.

From behind a nearby cloud, an observer watched with yellow eyes as the three mysterious beings vanished. The Dimensional Mirror itself was still intact–he had checked–but the appearance and subsequent destruction of a new Dimensional Mirror warranted some investigations. He had sat there, unmoving, for hours as he observed the newcomers to his universe.

Thankfully, it seemed that they were not much of a threat. If anything, they seemed confused and frightened, as if they had not intended to travel to Popstar. Still, their movements and inclinations were something to watch. If they posed a threat, he would have to eliminate them.

He was in the process of moving to a new vantage point to keep sight of them where they reappeared, but his communicator notifying him of an alert interrupted. Picking it up, he answered. “Yes, Captain?” he asked in a smooth, deep voice.

“We just got a report from one of our outposts, Sir,” came a far gruffer voice. “Dyna Blade is down, and it looks like Kirby is behind it.”

“Keep watch over him. He’s the one thing that might throw a wrench in our plans.”

“Of course, Sir. It would also appear that Dedede is at it again.”

His eyes narrowed. “Is he attempting to incite another famine to cement his rule?”

“That’s what we thought at first, but it seems like his forces have focused on antagonizing Kirby specifically.”

“He likely wants to settle a personal score, then. How goes the construction?”

“We’re nearing completion. If all goes according to plan, we should be able to launch in under a week.”

“Excellent. I will be returning to base shortly. The anomaly we detected near the Dimensional Mirror does not currently seem to be a threat, but I will be dispatching a unit to keep an eye on them.”

“Understood, Sir. Safe travels.”

With a click, he hung up. One more time, his eyes tracked over Green Greens and Mount Dedede, where he could make out lines of Waddle Dees carrying food up to the castle. He scoffed. Dedede’s attempts to cement his leadership were foolish at best and childish at worst, but the inner machinations of the penguin’s mind were none of his concern.

He would be overthrowing Dedede soon, anyway. He doubted the self-proclaimed king would be able to stand up to the might of the Halberd once it was complete.

Spreading his wings, Meta Knight took flight towards Orange Ocean.

Seeing this world from ground level was an even stranger experience than it had been from the clouds, Twilight thought as she trekked. The native inhabitants were…odd, to say the least. They were certainly more diverse than ponies were; she had counted at least ten different species in the hour and a half that she had been walking. There were strange mushroom-like creatures with detachable caps, sword-wielding, green-armored beings, cycloptic reddish-orange torsos with stubby arms and legs, shadowy figures in yellow armor with what looked like a sharpened boomerang of sorts, and so much more. Such was the sapient biodiversity of this world, she suspected that any double takes they had at her weren’t directed at either herself or the sleeping dragon on her back, but Sunset’s unconscious form she had levitating behind her.

By far the most common of this world’s inhabitants, though, were the small orange heads with nubby arms and stubby legs. They were quite similar in shape to the cyclopes she noticed earlier, but had two eyes instead of one and a defined facial structure. Honestly, they were incredibly adorable and Twilight had to work to resist scooping one up in a hug and squeezing it half to death.

Curiously, though, they all seemed to be carrying various food items and moving in the same direction. She was just following along with them at this point, since the path they were waddling on led towards the castle. Still, as she climbed the mountain, she couldn’t help but wonder what exactly they were using the food for. A celebration? Taxes? She hoped it wasn’t anything nefarious, but it would be just her luck if the world she landed in had an unstable government taking from the citizenry.

Well, it appeared that her questions would be answered soon. She had crested the ridge the castle was upon, its opulent gates in view. She stepped aside for a moment to let the final line of creatures pass. There was no sense in trying anything like sneaking in, after all. She doubted this world had ponies in it.

As she approached, following the last of the food-bearing bipeds, she was able to make out the figure of another one that seemed a bit different. There was a spear leaned against the wall next to it, for one, and the blue bandana it was wearing made it stand out further. Currently, it had a clipboard in its arms and was glancing between it and the line. After the final creature entered the gates, the bandana-clad being raised some sort of device to its face and began to speak.

“That’s the last of it from Green Greens,” he said. “Take five, everybody. We need to be in top shape for when Kirby arrives.”

He did…something with the device that made it disappear. Twilight was familiar with seven different storage spells that could do something similar, but she hadn’t seen anything that could indicate these things could do magic. Whatever the orange creature had just done seemed more like how Pinkie could fit just about anything in her mane, and Twilight could feel her urge to study rising. This world, so far, seemed relatively nonsensical and violated everything she thought she knew about magic. It was fascinating.

Before she could learn anything, though, she needed to make herself known. And so, she loudly cleared her throat, snapping the creature’s attention to her and her sleeping companions. “Erm…hello?” she said, her tone unsure.

The creature jumped in surprise, turning to face her very quickly. “Good afternoon,” he stated amicably, but inched towards his weapon all the same. Twilight didn’t fault him for that, of course. She was as unfamiliar to these creatures as they were to her, and she might be trespassing. “Who might you be, and what brings you to Castle Dedede today?”

“I am Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria,” Twilight responded, inclining her head downward slightly in a show of respect as the creature’s gaze flicked to the tiara still safely secured on her head. “I was hoping I might be able to speak to whoever’s in charge of the place?”

The creature bowed, or at least as much as something of his stature was able to. “I’m sorry. We don’t usually get visits from foreign royalty around here.” He grabbed his spear and gestured for her to follow. “I should be able to get you an audience with King Dedede if he’s not too busy.”

Twilight frowned a bit as she entered. “I don’t want to be a bother if he’s busy. Should I come back later?”

The spearman laughed. “Trust me, the King is hardly ever busy.” He blinked before smacking his forehead with his empty arm. “I haven’t introduced myself yet, have I? I’m General Bandana Waddle Dee, but please, just call me Bandana Dee or Bandee for short. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Your Highness.”

Twilight smiled. “Likewise. If you don’t mind me saying, you seem pretty informal for a general.”

Bandee shrugged. “Well, I’m pretty new to the job. King Dedede only put me in charge of his armies a couple weeks ago, and he only took power himself a month ago.”

“Oh?” Twilight inquired. “Would that have anything to do with all the food?”

“You’re fishing for information, aren’t you?” Bandee candidly said.

Twilight shrugged. “I’m new around here. I just want to know what the state of everything is so I can work with it.”

Bandee sighed. “Three weeks ago, King Dedede got it into his head that in order to solidify his leadership, he needed to steal most of the food in Dreamland. A creature called Kirby put a stop to that pretty quickly, but now he’s super focused on getting back at him.”

Twilight narrowed her eyes as they approached the massive doors to the throne room. Glancing up at her, Bandee gulped. “You’re planning on laying into him, aren’t you?”

“That depends on what he has to say for himself,” Twilight tried to placate.

“Just…don’t be too hard on him, please? He’s still new to the whole leadership thing. He’s a good guy at heart,” Bandee pleaded. Quietly, he muttered to himself, “I told him this was a bad idea.”

He took a deep breath and opened the doors to the throne room as calmly as he could. “Presenting Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria and…” he glanced at the sleeping forms of Spike and Sunset, “her guests.”

Once more, Twilight’s expectations were completely and utterly subverted. She had assumed that the King would be the same species as Bandee, perhaps larger and with different defining features. That was, after all, how Princess Celestia compared to the average pony.

She was not at all expecting him to be a massive blue penguin in a red robe. King Dedede was lounging on his throne, eating a bowl of grapes. Not really a good first impression. Frankly, with how cliché it was, Twilight almost expected someone to be standing at his side with an oversized fan.

The King did at least react to the newcomers in his throne room, though. Quick as a rocket, he shot upright in his throne and brushed off his robe. “Warn a guy first, Bandee!”

“My apologies, Your Majesty,” Bandana Dee said, “but I had no warning that we were having visitors, myself.”

Dedede blinked. “Well, I definitely haven’t heard anything about this!” He gestured for Bandee to leave. “Why don’t you take a lunch break, Bandana? I wanna have a talk with the Princess.”

Bandee bowed respectfully before taking his leave. Dedede, seemingly pleased with that, turned to Twilight and flashed her a grin. “So, what brings you to Dreamland, Princess?”

For a moment, Twilight debated exactly how much information she should divulge. The King seemed rather selfish, but Bandee had said that he had a good side. Hopefully, he would be willing to help. “An accident,” she finally answered. “I didn’t mean to come here, and right now we’re a bit trapped.”

Dedede frowned. “Well that doesn’t sound good, but I don’t see what that has to do with you coming to me.”

“I need time to research how to get back to my own world,” Twilight responded, “but to do that I need a place to stay, food, and water first. Are you willing to help?”

Dedede’s eyes narrowed. “Another world, eh? Yeah, that’s gonna be a no from me.”

Twilight’s planned speech died in her throat. “Wh…what?”

“I’m not dealing with any more aliens,” he explained. “That damned Kirby and Meta Knight are already bad enough. I don’t need another three running around and causing trouble.”

Twilight’s own eyes narrowed as well and she scoffed. “Well, I guess I should’ve seen that coming. You seem exceedingly hedonistic.”

“Hey! Don’t you come into my castle and tell me how to live my life!” Dedede shouted.

“And why shouldn’t I?” Twilight pressured. “If what I’ve heard is true, you stole most of the food in the country a few weeks ago. Do you know how many problems that might have caused? How many may have been lost to famine? A leader should set an example for their people, not exploit them!”

“Alright, that’s it!” Dedede shouted, and Twilight suddenly realized that lecturing a king in his own throne room was a spectacularly stupid idea.

She wasn’t quite sure where he got the absolutely massive hammer from, but she was quite glad that she noticed it before he cleared the distance between them in a single bound and brought it down on her. Thankfully, she had picked up some shield spells from her brother a while back, so she was able to spare herself and her companions from the blow. With a violet glow, a semi-transparent sphere appeared around Twilight, stopping the weapon short. A quick flare of telekinesis later, and both the sleeping Spike and Sunset were safely in the corner.

Dedede snorted as he backed up and Twilight let her shield fall. “I wasn’t planning on hurting them, anyway. ‘Least as long as they don’t mess with me when they’re awake.”

Twilight squinted at him. “I don’t believe you,” she stated before shooting a low-power magical laser at him.

Dedede shrugged and just deflected the blast with his hammer. “Well, it’s the truth.”

The pair fell silent as they circled each other, each looking for an opening. Besides the whole fiasco during Shining’s wedding, Twilight had never really been in a fight before. She knew she was powerful, sure. She knew that most things on Equus wouldn’t dare challenge an alicorn because of it. Even if the only offensive capability said alicorn had was discharging pure magical energy, the sheer power they packed into it would violently end most things if an alicorn stopped holding back.

Unfortunately, this was not Equus, and Dedede was not most things.

The King clearly had experience when it came to fighting. His stance alone told her that much. His eyes were cold and analytical, watching for any sign of weakness. Twilight lit her horn with a blank spell, just to be ready to react if he tried anything. And when Dedede suddenly dashed to her left, she raised a shield on that side of her body.

Had she had her brother’s training, perhaps Twilight would have seen the feint for what it was. A sudden movement like that just screamed that it was a distraction, but her knowledge in the subject area proved to be lacking as Dedede shifted his trajectory. Smoothly, he swung around to target her right side, moving far too fast for something of his size and stature.

Twilight’s eyes widened and she reflexively took to the air. It was just in time too; Dedede’s hammer impacted the ground hard enough to shatter the tile where she had been only moments before. She wobbled for a bit on her new wings, something that Dedede caught on to immediately. Instead of waiting for her to land or her being able to force him onto the back foot like she had hoped, he kept the pressure up.

Dedede jumped far, far higher than Twilight thought a penguin had any right to. Another hammer swing, and Twilight was forced to dive to avoid it. Another jump, another swing, and this time she had to ascend. A third time nearly sent her crashing into a wall, and Twilight was forced to admit that this wasn’t working.

She landed unsteadily near the door as Dedede was charging at her once again. Instead of throwing out another shield, though, Twilight changed up her strategy. She telekinetically picked up some of the debris Dedede had kicked up earlier and hurled it at the back of his head. None of it hit strong enough to do any real damage, but it was enough to distract him. With the King turned around to deflect the other projectiles, Twilight fired a beam of pure magic. It wasn’t anything particularly powerful–only about strong enough to knock out a strong earth pony–but she thought it would still be enough to take him down for the time being. Instead, the King simply tanked it with naught but a stumble forward.

When he turned around a moment later, Twilight could see his right eye twitching. “So, pulling out the cheap shots, are we?”

Then he threw the hammer.

Twilight yelped and teleported out of the way, the weapon still nearly grazing her chest from the suddenness of it. She raised an eyebrow at Dedede once she was safe, though. “Did you really just throw your weapon away?”

Dedede grinned, something that Twilight blanched at. Clearly he still had a plan. What, though, she couldn’t quite figure out until she spared a glance behind her and froze in astonishment.

The hammer, defying all known laws of aviation, had turned around midair and was coming right for her. She barely had enough time to light her horn and charge a teleport before it slammed into her left foreleg. She still got the teleport off successfully, but was hissing in pain when she reappeared behind Dedede and he caught the hammer. Her leg wasn’t broken, at least, but she was going to have to avoid standing on it for a while.

“Well, Princess,” Dedede said as he turned around, “two can play at the cheap shot game.”

Before Twilight’s eyes, and much to her worry, the hammer changed. Its wood casing gave way to metal in a series of whirring noises. Its cylindrical shape changed into a rectangular prism, the front of it having a hinged flap of some sort. But most distressingly, with the sound of an engine revving up, a jet of blue flame shot out from the end of it.

Panicking, Twilight canceled all other spells she had going and focused all her considerable might into erecting a shield.

Dedede swung, and dust filled the room.

Waking up and instantly having to cough out considerable amounts of dust was less than ideal, but Sunset had had worse wake-up calls before. A quick flare of aquamarine magic later, and a light breeze made the room visible.

Sunset frowned. She definitely wasn’t on the cloud anymore. Had Twilight moved her? Glancing down at the dragon beside her, who was slowly waking up himself, she figured that that was the most likely scenario. Now, where was she?

The walls looked like they were made of marble, columns stretching to the high ceiling and opulent windows displaying a great deal of the outside. Yellow and white square tiles covered the floor, where a red carpet led up to what was clearly a throne. Sunset scoffed. Of course royalty would attract more royalty to itself. That seemed like a multiversal constant. Though, the giant penguin with a high-tech hammer was new to her.

As she watched, the opaque violet sphere in the center of the room dissolved, revealing a panting purple pony princess. Sunset’s eyes widened. This blue penguin thingy had been attacking an alicorn? And winning? Hurriedly, she glanced at the massive doors. She needed to get the hell out of here.

A moment later, though, she glanced back at Twilight, who had the Element of Magic secured on her head. Sunset scowled, silently cursing the world. She still wasn’t willing to leave without getting her hooves on that artifact.

Before she could concoct any sort of plan, though, the massive penguin planted the hammer’s handle on the floor. “Still not done, Princess?” The hatch on the front of the hammer opened and…

Sunset blinked. Was that a missile launcher? In a hammer? She wanted one.

Before the missiles could be launched, though, two cries of “Everybody stop!” echoed throughout the chamber. One clearly came from the dragon beside her, Sunset could tell, and the other came from a side door.

Both fighters froze, Twilight’s hornlight dying as whatever spell she was preparing faded, and the hammer’s hatch closing. Everyone looked over at the second voice: a spear-wielding, bandana-wearing…Sunset wasn’t quite sure what that was, but she was going to call him Waddly for now, based on how he was walking. Regardless, he waddled in like he owned the place, pointing his spear right at the penguin.

“King Dedede!” he shouted in the tone of a disappointed parent. “I leave for five minutes to get food and you’re already fighting foreign royalty?”

Dedede pouted. He didn’t just frown, he full-on pouted. Sunset didn’t even know how a penguin could pout. “She started it.”

Twilight looked scandalized. “I most certainly did not. I just pointed out how utterly selfish it is to deny lost travelers a place to stay while they figure out how to get back home!”

Spike and Waddly simultaneously slammed an appendage against their foreheads and stalked over to their respective rulers. Had the situation not seemed so dire, Sunset probably would have broken out in laughter at the sight. Even as it was, she had to hold her giggles back when Spike started scolding Twilight.

“Twilight, did you walk up to a king’s throne room, insult him to his face, and not expect him to fire back?” he asked pointedly.

The mare opened her mouth, presumably to defend herself, but was cut off by Waddly berating his king.

“Sir, you hired me as a general and an advisor, so I’m going to advise you, alright?” he started. “You need to stop this. Taking people’s food, antagonizing Kirby, it’s not helping your image. The people think you’re a tyrant, and if you keep this up, you’ll become one.”

Dedede grit his teeth, but didn’t deny it. “Fine. But I’m still fighting Kirby. We’ve got a score to settle.”

Waddly sighed. “Alright, how about this. Once you and Kirby fight, you’ll stop trying to make him your enemy, or ‘fated rivals,’ or whatever you want to call it. Focus on ruling the Kingdom and don’t hyperfixate on one specific person.”

Dedede performed the penguin’s equivalent of pursing one’s lips and stared down at his advisor. After a moment of him staring back just as hard, he caved. “Alright, Bandana, have it your way.”

The door slammed open, admitting a strange-looking swordsman in green armor. “General Bandee, King Dedede!” he shouted, out of breath. “We’ve just received urgent news from Purple Plants!”

“What is it, Captain?” the general asked.

“Whispy’s been defeated!” the swordsman–Sunset was gonna call him Greeny for now–exclaimed. “Word is that it was Kirby’s doing!”

Bandee paled. “Already? We spent days setting up enough of a trail to lure him there, and he cleared it in twenty minutes?”

Wordlessly, Greeny nodded.

Bandee steeled his gaze. “Alright, notify Kabula. She needs to be in the air as soon as possible.” Once the captain had run off, he held up a…Sunset blinked in surprise again. Was that a PA system microphone?

Based on the echoing of Bandee’s voice around the castle, she supposed it was. “Everyone that’s fit to fight, assume defensive positions! Kirby will likely be here within the hour!” Disabling the mic, he turned to Dedede. “Your Majesty, you might want to retreat to the ring. Your mask should be there already, and I see you have your new hammer with you.”

Dedede seemed a bit shaken by how suddenly everything had changed, and Sunset mentally grinned. Ponies, humans, penguin-thingies, they all had the same tells of being frazzled and therefore being easy to manipulate. She did still need to find a way back to Equestria in order to take it over, and working with Twilight was her best bet to do so. She’d just need to find a way to betray her later.

“If I may,” Sunset began, snapping everyone’s attention to her, “me and my…companions do still need a place to stay while we research a way home. Clearly, Princess Twilight and the King have had a disagreement, but I propose a deal.”

Dedede leaned towards her and Sunset cheered inside her head. He’d taken the bait hook, line, and sinker. “I’m listening.”

“In exchange for providing the three of us with basic necessities, I'll help you with defending against this 'Kirby' character today. I might not be as magically powerful as Twilight is, but I’m certain I know far more combat spells.”

Dedede grinned and held out a flipper, and Sunset grinned and shook it with her hoof. “You’ve got yourself a deal, little pony.”

Author's Note

The Selfish Tyrant, King Dedede
The self-proclaimed King of Dreamland, this penguin packs a punch! Be careful not to get hit by his hammer, and maybe you can distract him long enough to strike back!

Poor pre-season 4 Twilight. New to her wings, new to princessing, not new to sticking her hoof in her mouth, and the only thing she knows about diplomacy is that she read about it in a book once. Granted, Dedede's not much better in that regard.

So, to explain a few things about how I'm mixing the Kirby timeline up slightly, I'd like to start by mentioning that I'm giving Bandana Dee his bandana from the beginning. Once Dedede made him general, he got it as a sign of his rank. He'll still be the Waddle Dee in the group during Crystal Shards, as I fully believe that if the idea of Bandana Dee had been conceived by Shimomura instead of Kumazaki he would've been in that game anyway.

Further, you might've noticed that Revenge of the King is currently happening, since in Ultra it's presented as a sequel to Dream Land. Mixing around where Super Star's subgames go is the main timeline finagling I'm doing, and I am also planning on moving Rainbow Curse a bit to keep the RtDL-TD-PR-SA Tetrology intact. The full list is as follows:

Kirby’s Dream Land
Dyna Blade
Revenge of the King <-- We are here
Revenge of Meta Knight
Kirby’s Adventure
Milky Way Wishes
Kirby’s Dream Land 2
Kirby’s Dream Land 3
Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards
Gourmet Race
Kirby and the Amazing Mirror
Kirby: Canvas Curse
Kirby: Squeak Squad
Kirby’s Epic Yarn
Kirby’s Mass Attack
Kirby and the Rainbow Curse
Kirby’s Return to Dream Land
Kirby: Triple Deluxe
Kirby: Planet Robobot
Kirby Star Allies
Kirby and the Forgotten Land

Whew, that was a long Author's Note. In any case, see you all next time, when our heroes first encounter the Pink Puffball of Doom!

Chapter II: Revenge of the King

As Sunset stood in one of Castle Dedede’s many corridors, Bandee at her side, she was starting to regret her habit of jumping to half-baked plans at the first opportunity. She had absolutely no idea just who or what this Kirby was, only that Dedede hated him and Bandee seemed utterly terrified of him. Even now, she could see the Waddle Dee shaking in place, barely able to grip his spear properly. At least the weapons they had given her were a plus.

Sunset grinned at the thought. Celestia had never let her anywhere near the armory back when she was a student. Some shit about how all the pointy objects were dangerous, to which a filly Sunset had scoffed and said that weapons were only dangerous to her if she made them dangerous. In hindsight, that was incredibly arrogant, but given that she was currently juggling a longsword, something Bandee had called a cutter blade, a spear, a quiver, and a loaded crossbow in her telekinetic grip, she felt that she had the skills to back it up at this point. She didn’t really need the weapons, per se–her purely magical strength was already more than enough to deal with most things–but with how concerned Bandee seemed, she felt like erring on the side of caution.

A shudder ran through the castle as a large explosion sounded from outside. Bandee glanced behind the two of them at the door leading to the boxing ring where Dedede waited and winced. “That sounded like Kabula just went down. Kirby’s in the building.”

A series of screams from above them confirmed it, and Sunset felt her ears involuntarily flattening against her head. She made a mental note to exercise purposefully moving her ears more; she had gotten used to a human form and a pony’s natural tendency to flatten their ears in fear or shame would get her nowhere in the lying department. Gritting her teeth, she pointed her weapons down the hall they were funneling Kirby through. According to Dedede, at least, he shouldn’t even come near the room that Twilight and Spike were hiding out in until this blew over. Not that she necessarily cared about what happened to them, but she knew that Twilight was a lot smarter than her. She needed her to figure out a way back to Equestria.

Bandee gripped his spear tighter as the double doors leading to the stairwell started banging. “He’s here.”

Sunset blanched. “Already? He just got into the castle around thirty seconds ago!”

Bandee audibly gulped.

The doors opened with a bang, and Sunset tensed, preparing herself for anything to come out of them. A horrific monster, perhaps. Or maybe something more subtle, an assassin that would slither in the dark.

Instead, she got a small pink sphere with arms and legs. Sunset blinked. There was no way that this was Kirby, right?

The being turned to stare at the two, and Bandana Dee nearly screamed. Sunset had to mentally hold herself back from laughing, though. The thing was adorable, with its wide eyes and happy smile. Seriously? This thing had the entirety of Dedede’s military petrified? It was skipping, for goodness sake!

An audible snicker finally escaped Sunset. “There’s…there’s no way, right? This thing is Kirby?”

Bandee looked at her, his expression horrified at her nonchalance, and Sunset just had to actually laugh at that. “I mean, look at him! He-” she paused to snicker again, “he barely could reach up to my elbow!”

Bandana Dee turned to face Kirby again, his spear at the ready. “Don’t let him fool you. He eats armies for breakfast.”

Sunset laughed. “What, do we need-” she had to take a deep breath to prevent another bout of laughter, “do we need the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch?”

Bandee steeled his expression and walked forward as the mare wiped a tear from her eye. Brandishing his spear, he addressed his enemy. “Alright, Kirby. If you want to get to the King, you’ll have to get through us first!”

Before he could move, though, Kirby opened his mouth, and Sunset’s laughter instantly ceased. Saying his maw unhinged like a snake would be inaccurate, since that would imply it had bones to unhinge in the first place. Instead, what was once his mouth became a gaping cavern of nothingness. The hallway’s air started to move, drawn inward like a swarm of moths to the world’s largest flame. Flaming torches flickered, the wind rushed by Sunset’s ears, and she could swear that, as she watched Kirby inhale, he was staring right at her. The clattering of a weapon hitting the ground reached her ears, but it seemed far more distant than it should be.

As quickly as the experience began, it was over. The wind stopped, the torches returned to their full glory, and Kirby returned to being a cute little pink puffball. Except the hallway had one tiny difference from before: Bandana Dee was no longer in it.

Kirby had fucking eaten him.

Instead, he now wielded a spear, and a red headband had wrapped itself around the top of his head. A golden centerpiece adorned it atop his forehead as well, but at this point Sunset didn’t much care about that.

Absently, she looked at the weapon she dropped when her brain had short-circuited. It was the sword. Kirby seemed to be politely standing there as he waited for her to do something, but instead she was just rapidly looking between him and the spear he was holding. After a few seconds though, she did recover enough to speak.

“You… You just… What in the everloving fuck was that?”

Kirby frowned, apparently unhappy with her use of an expletive. He held his spear and charged, beginning the battle.

Sunset forced herself to leap back and raise her own spear to parry his strike. No time to worry about the monstrous pink demon eating someone whole and alive right in front of her, she needed to focus on fighting it now.

Kirby struck again, this time swinging his spear in a downward arc. Despite the situation, Sunset found herself grinning as she leapt backwards again to dodge. He seemed to be using a spear like how one would fight with a blunt staff, not a pointy stick–clearly he was inexperienced with it. That was something she could use, at least. Once Kirby overextended himself again to try and strike her, she responded with a forward jab.

Unfortunately, she had underestimated just how fast Kirby was. The way he dodged seemed almost effortless, and he once more closed in for a strike. Sunset’s eyes widened as she felt her tail brush up against the wall; she’d managed to corner herself. She cringed. Using so much mana for a teleport this early on was unideal, but it was better than getting run through with a spear.

She reappeared behind Kirby, ready to strike as he whiffed a swing through her former position. Kirby, though, reacted far more quickly than she would have liked. He was still using the spear incorrectly, but apparently that didn’t matter with the sheer force he put behind spinning around and swinging.

The two spears met in the air in front of Kirby and impacted with enough force to utterly shatter both of them. Wood splinters went flying every which way and forced Sunset to raise a shield in front of her, but the pink blob seemed to care not for the debris. With a thunk, the two near-hypersonic spearheads embedded themselves in the wall, something that Sunset spared a moment to stare at with wide eyes. She really needed to stop underestimating things.

Strangely enough, Kirby seemed to have lost the headband when his spear broke, but she didn’t really have the time to consider that as he charged right towards her. Panicking, she hurled the boomerang-like cutter blade at him.

That was a mistake. Once again, Kirby opened his gaping maw, and an object disappeared inside of it. This time, though, Sunset saw the full transformation for what it was. Kirby physically squished down, nearly flattening himself to the ground. He near-instantly sprang back up, however, a wide smile on his face, a yellow cap on his head, and a cutter blade proudly held by his right arm.

Sunset paled. This thing could eat and copy weapons, and based on his stance, he felt far more comfortable wielding this than he did the spear. She glanced around at the sword on the floor and the crossbow in her grip and decided she didn’t want to take any chances. Her magic flared and gathered at the tip of her horn before shooting out in three different directions. The crossbow and quiver were both incinerated in an instant, the sword melting a moment later. She rolled her neck and stared directly at her adversary as he moved a foot back, prepared to strike. Time to stop messing around.

She began with a simple flamethrower spell, one of her favorites when she was a filly. The flame snaked forward toward its target, but based on everything Kirby had displayed so far, she doubted it would truly do much more than test the waters. Sure enough, a blade sliced through the flames and she jumped out of the way. The cutter lingered in the air for a moment, somehow staying in place and changing color twice before it rushed back to Kirby. The air around it was displaced so much, in fact, that the sudden wind managed to put the rest of her fire out.

Sunset narrowed her eyes. Alright, if those things could disrupt fire so easily, pyrokinesis wasn’t going to cut it. It was a shame; she quite liked playing with fire. Perhaps going the other way would help, then?

The temperature in the hallway dropped considerably and frost began to coat the walls as Sunset called upon the cryokinetic spells she knew. She wasn’t nearly as skilled in ice magic as she was in fire, but with any luck, Kirby wouldn’t be able to dispel them that easily. He charged forward again with a determined glint in his eye, but this time Sunset was ready.

A spike of ice shot up from the floor in front of him and even began to pierce through the ceiling. Kirby twirling around it almost seemed like a dance, but Sunset just sent another spike towards him, this time from the wall. He ducked just as she then gathered a glob of water around her horn, froze it, and hurled it at him.

He managed to deflect the iceball with a hit from his blade, sending it crashing to the floor. Said floor, though, promptly froze over around it as a thin layer of ice spread across the ground. Kirby finally, finally lost his footing and slipped up. Sunset’s horn shone brightly as she weaved another spell, all the ice in the room giving the whole area an aquamarine tint.

A moment later, Kirby was encased in a solid block of ice.

Sunset sat down hard and glared daggers at the frozen puffball. That was far more tiring than it should have been. Was she out of practice? Probably, she supposed. She had spent nearly a decade in the human world, unable to do magic. Hell, it was a wonder she had managed to keep up as much as she did during the fight. Still, though, she grinned. There was no way he was breaking out of that anytime soon. She’d invented the spell herself, after all, when Celestia had challenged her to learn more than just fire magic. The ice was far below freezing and reinforced with-

There was a cracking sound as Kirby twitched a bit inside the ice. A thin, hairline fracture appeared.

Oh shit.

The ice shattered into scores of pieces, freeing a shivering, determined, and downright angry Kirby as a cutter blade lashed out at her. Caught off guard, Sunset could do nothing as the flat of the blade slammed into her chest so hard it knocked the air out of her lungs and launched her backwards. With a shout, Kirby produced another blade and launched himself several meters into the air.

Shocked, Sunset did just about the only thing she could think of and sent a beam of pure magic at him, which successfully hit him and knocked him out of the air. In fact, it even sent his hat careening off his head and his blade launching into the now-frozen wall with the spearheads.

Sunset grinned and sent another beam his way in hopes of actually finishing him off. Instead, it turned out to be another terrible mistake as Kirby only responded by opening his mouth again and eating her magic.

The mare winced in pain as she felt the extra draw on her mana and shut her horn off immediately. Taking a moment to levitate a piece of debris and confirming that she did still have access to her powers, she glanced back at Kirby.

He now held a stylized wooden staff in his right arm, the top of it curving a bit. On his head was a traditional gray wizard’s cap, something the likes of which Sunset had only seen on Equestrian stage performers and in human pop culture. Frankly, she thought he looked like a miniature pink Gandalf.

Kirby himself looked at his new equipment curiously, but shrugged and instead pointed his staff at Sunset. With a shout, he shot a beam of bright blue magic towards her, and Sunset yelped in surprise and hastily set up a shield. At this point, she was going to assume that he could copy anything he ate and work accordingly. Luckily his magic didn’t seem all that powerful and the beam spilled off of her shield without much fuss.

Proper magic duels were something that Sunset never really had a chance to partake in–Celestia forbade her from challenging random guards to them after she hospitalized the first one. Honestly, she thought that was a bit of an overreaction; he had made a full recovery in only a week and they rebuilt the wall she burnt down within a day. It was like Celestia didn’t like her having fun.

Still, with Kirby limiting himself to firing beams of magic at random, she had this in the bag. She simply circled around him, occasionally erecting a shield if his aim improved a bit. He’d exhaust himself soon enough, after all. He had to be running on fumes at this point.

Thirty seconds later with no change, she started wondering where he was getting all this mana from. Using purely magical lasers like he was doing was terribly inefficient; it was why most combat magic focused on using the environment to your advantage. Even an alicorn might have trouble keeping up with the constant mana drain for a minute or so, but Kirby looked like he still had more than enough gas in the tank.

Sunset grit her teeth. If he had an infinite supply of mana to draw from, it would force her onto the offensive. The next beam he sent that actually went her way, instead of shielding or dodging, she met with one of her own. She smiled. Experience seemed to be on her side here, as her laser was overpowering his.

Then he crossed his arms and teleported, and Sunset felt her jaw drop.

He reappeared directly in front of her and underneath her laser in a flash of blue light and promptly decked her in the nose. The force of the blow sent her crashing into the much-abused wall, she felt and heard a crack from her right hind leg, and her face was screaming in pain. This fifty-centimeter puffball had broken her nose and her leg in a single punch!

Her labored breathing involuntarily hitched as Kirby tested out another one of his new abilities, and Sunset’s eyes widened. She hurriedly lit her horn and fixed her diaphragm. How the fuck was he using blood magic? She needed to end this now.

She used a fair amount of the rest of her mana reserves and sent a mote of light at Kirby, which he just stared at curiously. Sunset found the explosion that followed glorious, the concussive blast knocking away Kirby’s staff and hat and launching him right into the opposite wall. As the dust cleared, she stood there, panting heavily. Was it over?

Evidently not, as Kirby peeled himself off of the wall to face her again. Sunset legitimately growled. How the hell was he still standing? Her eye twitched and she used up most of the rest of her mana to send another explosion his way. Surely he couldn’t take two of them, right?

She just sighed as Kirby opened his mouth. Of course he was just going to eat the damn thing. Why hadn’t she expected that? She was running low on mana, tired, had multiple broken bones, and was frankly astonished that she was still standing. Still, she prepared herself for another magic duel.

It never came, though. Curiously, her explosion spell hadn’t given him another Gandalf cosplay, but instead a weird silvery curved hat with a star emblem on top, an amber gem embedded in the front, and some sort of lightshow going on inside. She couldn’t even get a shield up before Kirby activated it.

Sunset’s world went white.

When Sunset woke up, she couldn’t really see anything at first. Instead, everything was an indistinct blob of light and color and she shut her eyes at the intensity of it. Her ears were ringing, everything hurt, she doubted she would be able to use magic for at least a few hours, and she assumed there was some sort of internal hemorrhaging going on. Frankly, it was a miracle she was even still alive. Well, unless she wasn’t.

Is this Hell? she thought.

She felt her jaw forced open and something that tasted like tomatoes was forced inside her mouth. She worked her jaw with a great amount of effort, chewing and swallowing on instinct. Almost instantly, she felt her aches fading away and the incessant ringing in her ears stopped. She still groaned, though; she could feel some of her bones rearranging themselves as her body knit them back together at a breakneck pace.

“Wow, Kirby really did a number on you.”

Sunset cracked an eye open to look at who was speaking, and both of her eyes quickly widened in shock. “What the…? Bandee? Are we dead?”

Bandana Dee chuckled. “Well, I certainly hope not.”

There was a massive crashing sound as the wall behind Sunset’s sprawled out form collapsed. She turned her head to look at it. Spearheads, a cutter blade, a lot of frost–yep, this was the hallway she and Kirby fought in. “How…how the hell are we still alive? Everything Kirby did there should have killed me. I saw him eat you, for fuck’s sake!”

Bandee frowned. “Language.”

Sunset just responded by giving him a Look.

Bandee sighed. “I gave you a Maxim Tomato just now. That healed pretty much all of your injuries,” he explained. Sheepishly, he rubbed the back of his head. “And I probably should have warned you that Kirby eating someone doesn’t kill them. They just reappear back where they were a few minutes after Kirby’s done with the ability he got. He usually tries to avoid killing his enemies if he can help it.”

“So you mean to tell me,” Sunset seethed as she got back to her hooves, “that I was fighting like my life depended on it–and lost–and he wasn’t even trying that hard?”

Bandee cringed and gestured to the collapsed wall. “Well, clearly he was trying. But if he cut loose, I’m pretty sure the entire mountain wouldn’t exist anymore.”

Sunset’s train of thought derailed, fell off a cliff, crashed into a nuclear test site, and exploded. The thought of a half-a-meter tall round puffball with tiny arms punching with the force of a fusion bomb just did not compute. Sure, he probably nearly broke every bone in her body, but she had him on the ropes by the end of the fight, right?

Right?

Maybe it was because he was pink? Sunset shivered. Pinkie Pie may have been a high schooler, but she knew far too much, could break reality even as a human, and frankly terrified Sunset. Perhaps there was a correlation?

Bandee waved an arm in front of her face and said something, shaking her out of her stupor. “I’m sorry, what was that?”

“I was asking if you wanted to watch Dedede’s fight with Kirby.”

Sunset blinked. “That hasn’t already finished?”

“You were only unconscious for a few minutes,” Bandee said, “and the King has been specifically preparing to fight Kirby for weeks now.”

Sunset glanced at the large doors as a series of explosions sounded from behind them and she weighed her options. On one hoof, she had already fulfilled her end of the bargain. If Dedede had any sense of honor, he would have to provide her, Twilight, and Spike with at least basic necessities. On the other hoof, that fight had been a hell of a blow to her pride. It did seem like she’d be trapped here for a while, and if things in this universe really were as powerful as they seemed, that was power she could use to overthrow Celestia back home. Might as well learn from it.

“Why not?” Sunset finally answered, striding towards and opening the doors. As she and Bandee took a seat, she took a look at the room’s centerpiece: a boxing ring with a rather interesting addition. Covering the entire top of the ring was an electrified cage, underneath which the two fighters were duking it out. Kirby had a hammer now, because of course he did, and Dedede was wearing some kind of metal mask. The fight itself looked intense. Dedede was making full use of his hammer’s missile launcher, Kirby ducked and weaved between them like some kind of dancer, and both looked like they were even having fun.

Despite the battle, Sunset’s mind was elsewhere as she reassessed her entire plan. Getting on the bad side of anyone here was not a good idea. She did seem to be working her way into Dedede’s good graces, but Kirby was the one she would have to take care to not mess with. If what Bandee said was true, and with how thoroughly trounced she had been she thought it was, he could kill everyone in this castle if he wanted to. That kind of power was something she would want to manipulate and throw at her enemies, not the kind of thing she’d want to face herself.

Yet, as she watched Kirby land a final blow on Dedede, another, far more pertinent thought crossed her mind. According to Bandana Dee, Kirby tried not to kill. Which meant that Dedede just took getting launched through an electrified cage, a ceiling, and probably several walls and would be fine afterward. And the dude had taken on an alicorn and had been winning before he was interrupted.

She glanced between Kirby, who was happily waving at the two of them now, and the hole in the ceiling. She paled. Y’know what? Screw getting power for myself. If this is the kind of shit this world throws around casually, I need to get the fuck off this planet.

The door to Twilight and Spike’s room creaked open, prompting the princess to look up. That Dedede had taken Sunset’s deal was quite the surprise to her, but she wasn’t going to question his hospitality at this point. At least not to his face.

Honestly, she was a bit shocked that Sunset had even offered a deal like that, but she supposed that Sunset needed to get back home as much as she did. Speaking of, it seemed that the orange unicorn was entering. “Hi, Sunset! How did it go?”

Sunset didn’t respond for a good long while. Instead, she was just looking forward with a thousand-yard stare. It was a bit unsettling, really. “I need a nap,” she finally said.

Twilight blinked. “Didn’t you just wake up…” she glanced at the clock, “a couple hours ago?”

Sunset made her way over to a spare bed, not even bothering to give Twilight a glance. “I need a nap,” she repeated. “Wake me up for dinner.”

Author's Note

The Lost Thief, Sunset Shimmer
This pony from another world is working with King Dedede! She fights with both magic and traditional weapons and she's even one of the most powerful beings from her homeworld! She doesn't seem all bad, though. Perhaps in time, she could even be a friend!

Wizard Kirby
Boom, zap, kablam! Kirby's got magic now! With it he can do all sorts of things, like fire lasers, teleport, and even mess with an enemy's insides! Abra kadabra!

And so begins Sunset's long road to redemption. At this point, being a bad guy just isn't practical, at least on Popstar!

Honestly, it took me far less time than I thought it would to write the fight scene. Once I had it planned out the words just fell into place! I do hope that I did both Sunset's and Kirby's power justice, though. There's a reason she was Celestia's student before Twilight, and Kirby's still new to the job, but she was doomed from the start. After all, he's Kirby. The next chapter will probably take longer to write, though; it'll be very dialogue and character-heavy.

See you all next time for the first non-antagonistic meeting between Kirby and Dedede and our three heroes meeting some new faces!

Chapter III: Enemies Made Acquaintances

Spike glanced around the room, his claws tapping the bed he was sitting on. Really, this place wasn’t bad, necessarily. He got his own bed, for one, a luxury he didn’t have back home. He didn’t blame Twilight for that, of course; she was still the best big sister of all time, regardless of what the Crusaders insisted. Golden Oaks only had one bedroom–which was more like a loft, now that he thought about it–and it only had space for one bed. Thus, he slept in his basket.

He laid back and stared at the ceiling. Even though he could definitely get used to a mattress like this, he still yearned to be back home. He never really thought he’d get homesick so easily, especially after his impromptu trip to the Dragon Lands earlier that year, but he guessed being in an alternate universe with no way home would do that. Well, he supposed that they hadn’t exactly confirmed they were in a different universe, but magic mirrors like that always led to a parallel world in his comics. Like the one connecting Equus-616 and Equus-1610 in the Power Ponies comics!

This new world wasn’t all that bad, thinking about it. He could walk on clouds without Twilight casting a spell on him, he didn’t get weird looks because he was a dragon, and the food here was dang good! King Dedede had offered all three of them a slice of cake each as a bit of a forced apology for attacking Twilight. Spike and Sunset had each devoured theirs in seconds, but Twilight kept acting weird around hers. She’d taken a couple bites of it, sure, but after that her eyes had widened and she’d taken it off to the room they were offered.

He sat back up with a sigh. Homesickness was one thing, but at this point he was just kind of bored. He glanced at Sunset, who was asleep on the bed she claimed earlier. He had offered to help her earlier (a proposition that Twilight shot down faster than Rainbow Dash could fly), but by now he was glad she had told him no. That look Sunset had had earlier was haunting. Instead, Spike turned his gaze to Twilight. She was still staring intensely at half a slice of cake, a few pages of notes haphazardly scattered around it. Even now, she cast another spell, gave a disappointed sigh, and marked something else down.

“What are your secrets?” she whispered.

Okay, she’d hit the point that she was talking to inanimate objects. Time to interrupt it before she went mad again. Really, there was only one proper way to shock her out of a study session like this.

“You gonna eat that?” he asked.

“Eventually,” she hummed, not taking her eyes off the paper.

Spike narrowed his eyes. She’d entirely started focusing on studying; this was worse than he thought and he needed backup. Glancing at the clock, he noted that it was 5:39. That should be close enough to usual dinner times that Sunset wouldn’t mind being woken up, right?

He cracked his knuckles and walked over to her. Hopefully this went better than the time he woke up Twilight when she was seventeen–he was glad he could take getting blasted through two walls just fine even back then. Dragons were made of some tough stuff and he hadn't been injured, but the memory stuck out for him by it being the single most apologetic he had ever seen Twilight.

Preparing himself for a potential bout of angry telekinesis, he shook Sunset awake. Sure enough, he was near-instantly picked up in an aquamarine aura and braced himself, but the expected toss never came. Instead, he was roughly dropped right back down as Sunset sat bolt upright and winced.

“Gah!” she shouted before she cringed as she rubbed her forehead near the base of her horn. “Jesus fucking Christ I forgot how much mana burn hurts.”

“Language,” Twilight berated absently, still glaring daggers at her slice of cake. “Don’t repeat anything she says, Spike.”

“Don’t worry, Shining already taught me all the swear words ages ago,” Spike claimed.

Twilight pursed her lips and looked up. “I guess I’m going to have to have a talk with my brother when we get back home, then.” She looked at Sunset, who was massaging her temples. “Still, it’s a bit rude.”

Sunset gave Twilight a flat look. “I nearly died making sure your stupid ass had a place to research a way back to Equestria, so I’m gonna say whatever words I want to.”

Twilight frowned and looked Sunset over a bit. “You nearly died?”

“I got better,” Sunset defended. “Apparently tomatoes here are really good instant recovery spells.”

Twilight’s right eye twitched. “What?”

“Yeah, it’s weird,” Sunset agreed, “but hey, if eating a tomato means I don’t need life-saving surgery, I’ll take it.”

Twilight growled and tore three pieces of paper in half.

Sunset blinked in surprise. “What was that?”

“Oh, nothing,” Twilight said with a sarcastic bite. “Just my largest hypothesis on why eating a couple bites of this cake healed my leg. I’ve subjected it to every diagnostic spell I know, looked at it while casting lens of truth, even,” she gestured to the table, upon which was a cobbled-together machine of some sort and a glass of water, “ran it through a makeshift spectrometer. As far as I can tell, it’s not laced with a healing potion, it’s not laced with a painkiller, and it’s chemically, magically, and physically identical to a regular cake.”

Sunset shrugged. “Different universe, different rules?” she suggested.

“Sure, but those rules should still be consistent,” Twilight argued. After a moment, she flared her magic, organized the rest of her notes into a neat pile, and grabbed a fork. Stabbing her cake, she continued. “I guess I’ve gotten just about all I can out of this thing, so it’s time for me to take a step back, reevaluate how this universe works, and,” she grinned, “science the shit out of it.”

Spike pouted. “How come you’re allowed to swear?”

Twilight rubbed the top of his head affectionately. “Because I’m twenty-three and you admitted that you already know most of them.”

“That’s all well and good,” Sunset interrupted, “but what about, oh I don’t know, figuring out a way back?”

“Learning how the physics of this world works will help us find a way back!” Twilight retorted. “You have to be careful with these sorts of things. Everything I know about interdimensional travel says that you can’t just rip open holes in spacetime willy-nilly!”

“So...exactly what you did when you cast some sort of spell on Star Swirl’s Dimensional Mirror?” Sunset deadpanned.

“Th...that Mirror was Star Swirl’s?” Twilight stuttered, her voice clipping up an octave in shock and panic. “Oh no no no, this is bad. This is really, very, extraordinarily bad!”

Spike faceclawed. He knew where this was going.

“How does Star Swirl’s involvement make this situation any worse than it already is?” Sunset inquired.

“Don’t you get it?” Twilight practically shouted, launching across the room and violently shaking Sunset. “I destroyed a priceless magical artifact made by the Star Swirl the Bearded! My personal hero! Do you know how much knowledge we may have lost from that one mistake?”

“Ow, ow, Twilight I have a migraine please stop shaking me,” Sunset pleaded.

Almost immediately, Twilight stopped her shaking and fluttered backwards a meter or so, her ears flattening against her skull. “Sorry.”

Sunset went back to massaging her forehead. “It’s fine. I don’t think you should be too worked up in that respect about destroying the Mirror, though. I mean, I hate that we don’t have an immediate way back, but it’s not like you burned down the Library of Alexandria.”

“The what?”

“Alternate universe shit,” Sunset unhelpfully clarified.

Spike snapped a claw. “Hold on a sec. Fire! What if I try to send a scroll to Princess Celestia?”

Twilight looked over at him with wide eyes. “Spike, you’re a genius! Take a letter, please.”

Dutifully, Spike picked up a piece of paper and a pen as Twilight began dictating. “Dear Princess Celestia, I hope this letter finds you well. Spike, the attempted thief of my Element–whose name is Sunset–and I are all alive and well. We currently believe we are trapped in another universe and are actively looking for a way back to Equus. In the meantime, we are staying at Castle Dedede in a nation called Dreamland. The King offered us a place to stay after we explained our plight to him. Please let my friends know that I am okay and that I miss them. Your faithful student, Twilight Sparkle.”

Twilight and Spike glanced at Sunset, who had been progressively cringing harder and harder as Twilight spoke. “Is there something wrong with the letter?” Twilight asked.

Sunset didn’t answer for a few seconds. Eventually, though, she looked up. “You didn’t really mention that you had to fight Dedede and I had to fight Kirby for us to stay.”

Spike’s eyes narrowed. He knew that tone of voice; he’d heard it from Twilight numerous times. She was deflecting. He wasn’t exactly going to point that out, though. Whatever her true problem was with the letter, he didn’t really care.

“Princess Celestia hopefully doesn’t need to know that,” Twilight said.

Spike gasped as overdramatically as he possibly could. “You’re keeping something from the Princess? Who are you and what did you do with Twilight?”

Twilight just rolled her eyes and playfully cuffed Spike on the back of the head. “I just don’t want them to worry. Send the letter, please.”

Spike breathed a lick of green flame over the folded up piece of paper, and it dissolved into sparkling smoke before their eyes. The trail started out optimistically, rising as his magic should allow it to. Unfortunately, all the cloud did was circle the ceiling thrice, resolidify, and hit the ground back in front of Spike in the form of a letter once more.

Sunset smacked her lips. “Well, that was a bust,” she said calmly, but Spike could see the relief in her eyes.

Twilight looked down with a sigh. “It was a long shot, anyway.”

Spike reassuringly laid an arm across her withers. “It’s okay, Twilight. I’m sure we’ll find a way back soon.”

Twilight wrapped a foreleg around him to pull him into a hug. “I hope so, Spike. I hope so.”

A knock at the door snapped everyone’s attention away from the somber air. Plastering a smile on her face, Twilight opened it with her magic, revealing Bandee.

“Hi,” he said, a bit awkwardly. “King Dedede asked for me to fetch you guys. Dinner’s starting soon.”

Well, Twilight thought, that’s certainly one way to make sure all that food doesn’t go to waste.

As an official apology for his actions towards Kirby (though Twilight privately suspected that it had more to do with Bandee pressuring him), King Dedede was hosting a massive banquet with an open invitation to all residents of Dreamland. The spread was impressive, with a wide variety of food available from a multitude of different climates. From bananas to grapes, tomatoes to radishes, anything anyone could want to eat was available. He even accommodated Spike’s diet when she mentioned that dragons eat gemstones!

Spike was currently animatedly talking with Bandee while working through a sapphire, though he was making occasional glances at the desert table. Twilight would have to keep an eye on him to make sure he actually finished the meal she had prepared for him before he dived into the cake. Bandee caught her eye and the two seemed to come to a silent understanding. He nodded at her and kept talking with Spike, presumably content to make sure the young dragon didn’t make a beeline for the pastries.

General Bandana Waddle Dee was an interesting one. Despite claiming to be new to a managerial position, he was able to command respect and had the same knack for strategy that Shining had, even when he was usually the smallest thing in the room. Hay, he seemed to be one of the few beings that Dedede actually listened to. She definitely owed him one for getting the King to let them stay.

King Dedede himself was…odd. On one hoof, he was unreasonably selfish, stupidly powerful for no discernable reason, and all-around, kind of a jerk. On the other, he was honorable, incredibly loyal to his subjects, and surprisingly competent in matters of ruling. Enough so that he and Twilight were able to have an actual conversation on it.

“So you say that Dreamland didn’t have a centralized government before you rose to power?” Twilight clarified.

The King nodded. “I thought I’d step up and add some structure to the place, y’know? Planet Popstar’s a big place, and if some other country decided that they wanted to take over, there’s not much we could do without a leader!”

Twilight nodded, mentally noting down the name of the planet for later. “I see. I suppose that’s an angle I’d never thought of it from. Somepony else has always been in charge of the military back in Equestria, and on top of that I’ve only been a princess for a few weeks.”

Dedede blinked. “Oh? Sounds like a bit of a story if you’re that new to the throne.”

Twilight fluffed her wings a bit. “I just earned my wings by completing an ancient magical spell and fixing a mistake I made myself.”

“Giving yourself wings makes you a princess?” Dedede asked, a bit confused.

“Apparently, but it doesn’t have to be getting wings. I know of one case where a pegasus gave herself a horn,” Twilight answered. “Of those of us in Equestria with royal titles, four of us are alicorns. Princesses Celestia and Luna are the country’s diarchs and control the Sun and Moon, respectively, my sister-in-law Princess Cadance rules over the Crystal Empire to the north, and I don’t have any land claims yet.” She stopped to consider something. “Come to think of it, the only non-alicorn royals are Prince Blueblood, who claims to be descended from Princesses Celestia’s and Luna’s older brother–who himself wasn’t an alicorn and died over a thousand years ago–and my brother Shining Armor, who gained the title of Prince-Consort when he married Cadance.”

Dedede, for his part, looked interested. “That’s a neat system you’ve got there. Those reigning princesses, Celestia and Luna, you said they’re over a thousand years old and control your world’s Sun and Moon? I’m kinda surprised one of them isn’t a queen.”

Twilight nodded. “Princess Celestia was offered the position when she first ascended, but she didn’t want to outrank her sister. And as far as I know, alicorns stop physically aging at around the age of thirty and just get bigger for a few decades afterward.” She looked down. “I know we can get powerful enough to throw around celestial bodies like they’re made of cardboard on top of that, but frankly I’m not sure I’m really qualified for the position of princess. A few weeks into the job and I’ve vanished off the face of Equus.”

Dedede chuckled. “Ah, I’m sure you’ll do a fine enough job once you get back home. Don’t be afraid to mess up; I know I have.”

“The food-stealing?” Twilight asked.

“The food-stealing,” Dedede conceded. “Not my brightest moment, I’ll admit. And at this point, I absolutely know that I can’t beat Kirby, so I don’t think I’ll be trying anything like this again anytime soon.” After a moment, he snapped his flipper, somehow. “Oh! Just to let you know, don’t try to mess with Popstar’s Sun and Moons while you’re here. I’m pretty sure they’d take offense.”

Twilight blinked. “They?”

“Our Sun and one of our Moons are sapient,” Dedede explained as Twilight’s brain suddenly had to reboot. “I’ve talked with the Sun. She’s a nice enough fellow.”

Choosing to spare her sanity and focus on something else for the time being, Twilight’s attention turned to the pink ball devouring food item after food item a few tables away. Apparently, this was the Kirby everyone was so worked up about. He seemed cute and non-threatening, but Twilight had met Angel Bunny. She knew just how easily that cute exterior could be a facade, and Sunset had fled to the opposite side of the room as soon as she caught sight of him. Given that Kirby had quite literally inhaled a fourteen course meal and was getting his fifteenth, she had a good reason to be weary. Granted, he did wave cheerfully at her once he realized that Twilight was looking at him, so she wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it.

She was sure that anything with that bottomless of a stomach was a threat, though. She’d had to replace her entire pantry once after Pinkie raided it, after all!

“I’ve gotta say,” Dedede mentioned, pulling Twilight out of her musings, “you’ve got me kind of curious. What kind of mistake was so big that fixing it got you immortality?”

Twilight frowned in concentration. “Well, to explain that I’ll have to tell you about how my friends and I met. And to explain that, I suppose I’ll have to tell the tale of Nightmare Moon…”

Sunset sat alone at a corner table, picking at her food as she wearily glanced around. Another course disappeared down the gluttonous pink demon’s gullet, vanished into the aether as it was unable to satisfy his boundless hunger. A creature most cultures on Equus considered so powerful as to be a goddess casually chatted with another being that could potentially beat even her in a fight. A fire-breathing dragon–young, but still nigh-immune to most spells and did she mention he was a dragon–was watched over by a general who had the respect of an entire military. Any one of them could probably end her life in an instant if they were so inclined.

Why the fuck had she thought hoodwinking them was a good idea?

Especially if Twilight discovered her true intentions for stealing the Element of Magic. She was already uncomfortably close to slipping up when they tried to send that letter, and if Twilight knew about Sunset’s plans she probably wouldn’t hesitate to keep her locked up somewhere. No, she needed to keep herself useful to Twilight–somehow–and also not reveal any smidge of her actual plan.

And if they did figure out how to communicate with Equestria, she needed to somehow stop her from letting Celestia know that she was there. If Celestia found out that Sunset had returned...

She shuddered. Celestia couldn't find out, her life depended on it. So, she needed a cover in case her plans came up in conversation with Twilight. Maybe she could say that she was paid to make the heist? Would Twilight even buy that? Sunset chuckled. Perhaps she would; she was pretty naïve.

“You alright?” came a sudden voice from her left, and Sunset shrieked and fell off her chair. Her salad bowl crashing down on her face right afterward did not do anything to improve her mood.

A snicker sounded from above her. “Sorry for startling you. I was gonna talk with Kirby over there, but you looked like you needed a friend!”

Sunset lifted the bowl off her head as she sat back up and looked at the being talking to her. He was short–about the same size as Kirby, actually–and was a lighter pink, almost lavender color. He was an armless sphere with brown shoes and giant eyes, a wide smile crossing his face above a red bowtie. Combined with the two-tone jester’s hat, he looked downright adorable.

Kirby had taught her to be weary of cute things, though. “Who’re you?” she inquired as her eyes narrowed.

The jester grinned. “I’m Marx! What’s your name?”

Author's Note

Me carefully adding trauma to my characters to make the plot more interesting:

Marx's sudden but inevitable betrayal will be for the sake of character development, I promise!

Also, Dedede can be rather eloquent if he's not behaving like a selfish man-child. So at this point in his character arc, you can get a decent conversation out of him maybe 20% of the time.

I apologize for the slightly shorter breather chapter, but not every chapter can be nonstop action. This one is very character-heavy and is focused on Spike's reaction to the whole situation, Twilight and Dedede getting to know each other better, Sunset's continual shifting of her plan, and a bit of setup for Milky Way Wishes. Hopefully I was able to portray their thoughts well enough!

Revenge of Meta Knight is fast approaching, but the Halberd's construction isn't quite complete yet. Instead, next up is a glimpse into how Equestria has reacted to its newest princess vanishing!

Chapter IV: An Equestrian Interlude

The Crystal Empire’s throne room was usually a quiet place, something that Princess Cadance and Prince-Consort Shining Armor greatly appreciated. It allowed the two to perform their duties in peace, even if those duties were mostly paperwork at this point. The two had been debating over how to best go about tax reforms for the better part of two months now, for instance, but that’s beside the point.

Their duties also included holding court, but petitioners were few and far between. The Crystal Ponies were still unused to a benevolent monarchy after Sombra’s reign of terror, so many still avoided the palace despite the doors being open for any to enter and petition the royal couple. Or at least, the doors were usually open to any citizen. Right now, things were a bit different.

The room played host to the reigning princess and her husband, of course, along with the usual smattering of guards, under orders not to reveal anything that was said while the doors were sealed. Also present were the two reigning princesses of Equestria, Celestia and Luna, two alicorns over eleven hundred years old and powerful enough to throw around stars like paperweights. Five sixths of the Elements of Harmony were also present, their emotions a mix of worried, peeved, and downright furious.

Sunburst felt incredibly out of place as nine of the most important ponies on the planet stared directly at him.

When he’d received a summons to the Palace earlier that morning, he had nearly flown into a panic. They knew about his illicit trip through the Mirror; they had to. Oh, how he hoped that Sunset hadn’t done anything rash, but knowing her, she probably did. He knew that hindsight was 20/20, but he still internally berated himself for being so forthcoming with information when she asked him.

Still, he bowed when he entered the room. “Good,” he gulped, “good afternoon, everypony.”

The expressions of the ponies staring at him varied greatly. Princess Celestia was offering him a reassuring smile, giving off the air that she knew everything would turn out alright. Princess Luna maintained a small frown. Rarity, Fluttershy, and Princess Cadance all had worry in their eyes. Applejack and Pinkie Pie were glaring at him, something that seemed antithetical for the latter based on everything he knew about her. Rainbow Dash hovered above them, and she seemed ready to attack him at a moment’s notice.

Absently, as most of his mind was on what he should be putting in his will, he wondered where Princess Twilight was. Shouldn’t she be here if all of her friends were? He blinked. Wait a second.

They knew he knew about the Mirror.

Princess Twilight was missing.

Oh.

Oh no.

“I’m going to cut to the chase,” said the one pony Sunburst least wanted to talk. Shining Armor looked absolutely livid, and he guessed the only thing stopping him from having Sunburst arrested on the spot was that Princess Celestia had asked him not to. “Princess Celestia knew that you broke into the Palace during yesterday’s Princess Summit, but for some reason,” Shining glared at her, “she elected not to inform us of this until this morning. She also knows that you interacted with something she called Star Swirl’s Dimensional Mirror. A Mirror that my siblings jumped through–chasing after a thief, mind you–before it disintegrated. You are, right now, just about our only lead as to the location of Equestria’s newest princess.” He stood up and rolled his neck. “Start talking.”

Princess Cadance laid a hoof on his back. “Honey, I know you’re upset, but scaring the poor stallion isn’t going to get Twilight back any faster.”

Sunburst gulped as he readjusted his glasses and looked up at the angry unicorn. “The Mirror did what?”

“It broke,” growled Rainbow Dash. “Shattered. Exploded. Whatever you want to call it.”

“It looked more like an implosion to me,” Pinkie added, though her expression didn’t change.

Sunburst shook his head. “But the Mirror breaking shouldn’t even have been possible! That wormhole was one of the most stable things in the universe; I did the measurements on it myself! The only way it could break without inciting vacuum decay is if the destination universe was altered!”

“The destination what?” Shining asked, his voice low.

“Perhaps,” Princess Celestia interjected before the prince could do anything rash, “Sunburst should explain exactly why he knows so much about Star Swirl’s Mirror.”

Sunburst gulped. “Of course, Your Majesty.” He looked out across the room, trying to work out how to best word his story. “Around eight years ago, my sister vanished, and I flunked out of CSGU a few months later. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had run off into the Mirror.”

Shining glanced at Princess Celestia, who nodded with a wistful look in her eyes. “Sunset Shimmer was a personal student of mine before Twilight. She was an incredibly promising young mage, enough so that I had originally planned for her to be a potential wielder of the Element of Magic.” She sighed. “Unfortunately, she eventually grew obsessed with the idea of turning herself into an alicorn. And when I shut down her studies in blood magic, we got into an argument. I…” she drew in a shaky breath. “I said some things that I shouldn’t have. She packed her things and fled that night, and by the time I found out where she had gone, the Mirror had closed for another thirty months.”

“Princess Celestia kept up the official search parties for a few months after that, even though she knew they were pointless,” Sunburst added. “My parents gave up hope of finding her after around half a year, but I never stopped looking. I had to believe that Sunset was still out there, somewhere. And a year or so ago, my search paid off.” He paused to gather his thoughts again. “I found a hoofnote trail that led me to proof of the existence of other universes, and the potential for mirrors connecting them. Once I felt that I had gathered enough evidence for where Sunset might have vanished to, I confronted Princess Celestia with it.”

Everypony’s attention snapped back to Princess Celestia. “It’s true,” she affirmed. “That Sunburst even managed to prove the Mirror existed was impressive, and I allowed him to do his own research on it in the hopes that he might find something that I missed.”

Sunburst nodded. “I was able to prove that the connection between the two universes was stable, at least. Despite my best efforts, though, I couldn’t get it to open outside of its regular three-day window every thirty months.” He sighed. “Princess Celestia shut down the research after a couple months, but she did inform me when the Mirror was moved to the Crystal Empire. I had figured out when its next opening should be, so I moved here, found out where it was being kept, and waited until I could slip through it to try and find Sunset.”

Pinkie Pie leaned forward, her eyes considerably softer than they had been. “Did you get to see your sister again?”

“Yes, but it was weird,” Sunburst said. “Going through the Mirror turns ponies into strange ape-like creatures called humans. Or at least, that’s what Sunset said they called themselves. I still found her pretty quickly, though; I could recognize her anywhere.” He sighed. “I was just so excited to see her again that I answered any questions she had about what was going on in Equestria until she told me to get lost again. I guess she was just using me to figure out how to steal the Element of Magic, huh.”

He looked up as he heard some sniffling and saw Rainbow Dash looking at Rarity incredulously as she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Are you crying?” Rainbow asked.

“Of course!” Rarity exclaimed. “This is a story of a student that felt scorned by her teacher, of a brother’s love that transcends time and space, and of a reunion that inevitably went south!” She sniffled again. “It’s positively dramatic!”

Rainbow rolled her eyes and dashed over to be right in front of Sunburst. “Telling some sob story doesn’t fix anything! In fact, this whole thing sounds like it’s your fault for telling Sunset everything!”

“Simmer down, Dash!” Applejack shouted. “This ain’t no one’s fault but Sunset’s.”

“No, she’s right,” Sunburst himself said. “I should have realized that the questions Sunset was asking were suspect. And I'll do anything I can to help find everypony who disappeared.”

“Good, now where are my siblings?” Shining asked with venom in his voice.

Sunburst cringed as he adjusted his glasses. “That’s the thing: I don’t know. The only way the Mirror could have broken is if the wormhole was shifted onto an unstable path, so either Sunset or Princess Twilight must have somehow changed the destination matrix.”

The room went so silent one could have heard a pin drop. “Well isn’t that just perfect,” Rainbow growled after a moment as she landed. “She and Spike could be literally anywhere!”

“It…it should still be possible to find her!” Sunburst stammered defensively, taking a step backwards to put some distance between him and the vehement mare. “I know the theory for how the Mirror worked, I just don’t have the power to cast the spells!”

“Great!” Rainbow exclaimed. “So we just get the Princesses to cast the spells and get Twilight back!”

“Unfortunately, it will not be that easy,” Princess Celestia said. “While Luna and I are both powerful, neither of us has the skill with portals that would be required.”

“What if we ask for help?” a quiet voice piped up.

Everypony looked at who spoke, and Flutershy hid behind her mane. “What was that, Sugarcube?” Applejack asked.

“What if we ask for help?” Fluttershy repeated, louder this time.

“The public can not yet know of Princess Twilight’s disappearance,” Princess Luna finally spoke up. “We cannot simply put out an advertisement in the newspapers asking for a powerful magic user to divine her location.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean anything like that,” Fluttershy shook her head. “I was going to ask Discord for help.”

Rainbow Dash gave out a mirthless, obviously fake laugh. “Hilarious, Fluttershy,” she deadpanned. “Maybe he’d look through other universes and come back with an evil version of Twilight.”

Fluttershy frowned. “Now, I know Discord has done some bad things in the past, but-”

“I’m sorry, Fluttershy, but I am afraid that I must agree with Rainbow Dash, for once,” Rarity cut in. “Involving somepony as brutish as Discord in such a delicate situation is only asking for trouble.”

“Agreed,” Applejack said.

Fluttershy looked pleadingly at Pinkie Pie, who herself looked conflicted. Eventually, she sighed. “I think we should give it a shot, girls. We all agreed to be nice to Discord after he reformed.”

“Be that as it may, Discord’s tendencies to overdramatize situations would be unhelpful,” Princess Luna pointed out. “Perhaps we should table this discussion and focus on finding somepony talented in portal spells.”

“The last time I knew of a pony with a cutie mark in portal spells was over four hundred years ago,” Princess Celestia mentioned. “We’ll need somepony like Twilight, whose special talent involves magic as a whole.”

Sunburst frowned. “I might know of a pony like that,” he said, and everpony turned to look at him. He stared up at Princess Celestia. “Would it be possible for me to find the public records for a mare named Starlight Glimmer?”

Fluttershy watched with wide eyes as Rainbow punched the wall in anger for the fifth time in as many minutes. The five remaining Elements were back in Ponyville only a day after Twilight disappeared, told to stick to the cover story that Twilight and Spike were still in the Crystal Empire and would be returning in a week or so. And if the Princesses and Sunburst made any leads on Twilight’s location, they would be informed and back in the Empire shortly.

Currently, the group was in Golden Oaks, skimming the entire library for anything that might help. None of them were content to just sit around and go about their normal lives when one of their closest friends was missing, but Rainbow seemed to be reaching her limit.

“Ah don’ think the wall can take much more of that, Dash,” Applejack pointed out.

Rainbow snorted as she landed, tossing a book on the ever-growing pile of dead ends. “I don’t think my brain can take much more of this.”

Applejack frowned. “That’s soundin’ like quitter talk. And not one of us is gonna quit when Twi might be in danger.”

Pinkie hummed in agreement from where she had her nose in a book.

Rarity pursed her lips. “Applejack, while I appreciate your willingness to help our friend, don’t you think that this,” she gestured at the mostly-empty shelves, “is a bit excessive?”

Applejack snorted. “Ah’m just doin’ what Ah can to help. Not tellin’ anypony what’s goin’ on already rubs me the wrong way, so we gotta do somethin’, y’know?”

“Has anypony told Twilight’s parents?” Pinkie asked, somewhat absently. “I think they deserve to know what’s going on.”

Applejack gestured vaguely in her direction.

Rarity sighed. “We have been here, looking at books, for over half a day. We are not going to be of any help to anypony if we work ourselves half to death figuring out how to get Twilight back! You need a break sometimes, Applejack.”

“Yeah!” Rainbow agreed. “Reading dusty old books isn’t gonna help me. I need to be out training so I can be fast enough to stop something like this from happening again!”

“That is not at all what I said,” Rarity mentioned, but it went unheard by the other two.

Applejack shut the book she was reading and stared up at Rainbow. “What, you’re gonna fly so fast you break into another universe?”

Rainbow landed hard on the floor. “No, but at least I’d be able to stop anypony else from making a stupid mistake like falling into a portal!”

Applejack stood up to face her.

“I really don’t think fighting is going to do us a lick of good, darlings,” Rarity tried to placate.

“What we have here is a rare opportunity to get somepony back before they’re gone for good,” Applejack argued. “Ah ain’t squanderin’ it.”

“You weren’t there!” Rainbow shouted. “You didn’t watch one of your best friends dive headfirst into a swirling vortex! You weren’t too slow to stop her!”

Rarity sighed. “Neither of you are listening to me, are you?”

“You think this is the first time Ah’ve nearly lost somepony?” Applejack snarled lowly, nearly nose-to-nose with Rainbow. “You think Ah didn’t spend months wishin’ my parents would just show up one day none the worse for wear? That Ah didn’t hope beyond all hope that rockslide actually missed ‘em an’ just got the pie cart? You can’t change the past, Rainbow!”

“Oh, so this is about your parents, now?” Rainbow growled. “I didn’t know they had something to do with interdimensional travel.”

Pinkie looked up, concerned. “Uh, girls? You’re both being kinda mean right n-”

“Ah’m tryin’ to say that my parents are gone, but Twilight ain’t yet!” Applejack shouted, throwing her Stetson to the ground for added effect. “So if you’d stop bein’ so damn focused on how fast you were for five seconds-”

“Y’know what? That’s it,” Rainbow interrupted, flaring her wings and taking to the air. “I’m done. You can keep reading your stupid books that get you nowhere, I need to actually do something.” With that, she sped out the door.

Applejack huffed. “The utter nerve on that mare. You agree with me, right Rares?”

Rarity pursed her lips again. “Had you been listening to me as I tried to break up you and Rainbow’s frivolous argument, you would know that I agree with neither of you. I just think we need a break.” She got up and made for the door. “I promised Sweetie Belle that she could stay the night at the Boutique today, so I must be off. I also will not be able to help you tomorrow, as I can only keep Carousel Boutique closed so many days in a row before it takes a hit to my finances. I’m sorry.”

As she left, Applejack turned to Pinkie. “...Pinkie?” she asked.

Pinkie sighed, her mane ever-so-slightly droopy. “You and Dashie were both being big meanie-pants back there.”

“But…you agree with me, right?” Applejack pleaded.

Pinkie went silent for several seconds. Eventually, she got up to leave. “I told the Cakes that I’d watch the twins tonight so that they could go on a date,” she gave a nonanswer.

Applejack turned to the final pony in the room, desperation clear in her eyes.

Fluttershy sighed. This whole situation was tearing her friends apart, and she hated it. “I think you and Rainbow both said some hurtful things, but neither of you were really wrong.”

“Thanks, ‘Shy,” Applejack said. “I just hope we can get Twi back soon.”

Fluttershy steeled her expression. They needed Twilight back, and she only knew of one way they might see her again in a timely manner. Tuesday was only three days away, after all.

“You’re right, we need Twilight to come home as soon as possible,” she said, starting to flutter towards the door. “So I’m getting Discord.”

It was late Monday night–nearly Tuesday morning, even–when Luna landed on her sister’s balcony in Canterlot. It was unlike Celestia to be up so late into the night, but the light pouring out of her window suggested that the elder princess was still awake. “May we ask, dear sister,” she said as she pushed open the door, “what has you awake?”

Celestia smiled. “Ah, Luna! Just the mare I wanted to talk to.” She levitated over a manila folder. “Take a look at this, will you?”

Luna opened the folder as Celestia took another sip out of her coffee mug. “Let’s see here. Starlight Glimmer, unicorn mare born in Sire’s Hollow on the second of May 975 to historian Firelight and stage performer Tophat Tumble. Cutie mark is a four-pointed violet star with a trail of aquamarine magic, likely representing her skill in all magic. Missing pony report filed for her in 991, and declared legally deceased at age seventeen in 992.” She placed the folder back on Celestia’s table. “Well, Tia, it seems fairly cut-and-dried. The mare Sunburst knows of with a talent for magic is dead.”

“I thought so myself at first, but something doesn’t add up,” Celestia countered. “I visited Sire’s Hollow,” she glanced at the clock, “yesterday to confirm the case, but nopony in that town actually believes that she’s dead. Her father claims to have last heard from her in 997 when she sent him a letter.” She held up a few pieces of paper in her magic. “I checked with the local school system and the police department to see if they had any of Starlight’s old assignments to double check that the letter is legitimate. It’s the same horrid hornwriting.”

Luna frowned at the documents. “While this is odd, it could still be a forgery.”

Celestia nodded. “Of course. That’s why I started digging deeper in the records we have stored in Canterlot.” Her horn flared and flipped over a corkboard she had, revealing a large number of newspaper clippings and red string. “I understand that this makes me look a bit crazy, but hear me out here.” She pointed to an image. “This was taken in Baltimare in 993.” Sure enough, in the background of the picture was a mare with the exact look of Starlight Glimmer. “Then another from Fillydelphia in 995. Another from Manehattan in 996.”

“You think she was very slowly moving up the coast?” Luna inquired.

Celestia shook her head. “Sightings of her stopped after 996, so she probably found someplace to settle in when she sent that letter in 997. Based on her trajectory, that’s likely right,” she put a pin in the map on the corkboard, “here, in this rain shadow.”

Luna frowned. “While, again, this is certainly odd, it seems like far more work than necessary to find one mare that doesn’t want to be found.”

“I agree,” Celestia said, “but that’s where it gets concerning.” She gestured towards a few dozen other newspaper clippings with string attaching them to the map. “Double Diamond: reported missing after going on a ski trip in some mountains in our area of interest in 997. Party Favor: went on a soul-searching journey in the area and never came back home in 999. Sugar Belle: vanished from a tour group near Manehattan after she reportedly wandered off towards the area in 998.” She took another sip from her coffee mug. “I’ve read the police reports. Every single one of these ponies was dissatisfied with their lot in life and wanted to get away for a while. Several were ruled to have likely committed suicide, but with all of this, I’m not so sure.”

“Where are you going with this, sister?” Luna asked, her own eyes tracking up and down the corkboard.

“Everypony in Sire’s Hollow–other than her father–had the same thing to say about Starlight. She was aloof, prone to anger, wanted to be in control of everything, and had an irrational hatred for cutie marks,” Celestia explained. “I don’t think this is just a bunch of unrelated missing ponies cases. I think she may have started a cult.”

Luna sighed. She had a long few nights ahead of her. “I assume you want me to try and find their dreams?”

Celestia nodded. “Not tonight, of course. But this is our only potential lead to finding Twilight without inciting mass hysteria or involving Discord, so I would appreciate it.”

Fluttershy involved Discord the next morning.

“Sparklebutt is missing, you say?” he asked, his eyebrows literally flying off of his face. They grew wings and everything. He snapped his talon and an anvil decorated with crayon drawings of the Elements and barely secured by a rope appeared suspended from Fluttershy’s ceiling. “So those little sparkly rocks you have dangling over my head,” he snapped his tail and the anvil vanished, “don’t work?”

Fluttershy glared at him. “Yes, but if you know what’s good for you, you won’t try anything.”

Discord gasped and placed his paw over his chest. “Moi? Try something?” He snapped a halo over his head. “Perish the thought! I'm reformed, remember?”

Fluttershy gave him a flat look.

Discord picked up the halo and took a bite out of it like a donut. “Nothing? I know it wasn’t a full-on visual gag, but usually my sarcasm can at least get a chuckle out of you.”

“Twilight is missing, Discord,” she repeated. “Did I not emphasize that enough the first time?”

The draconequus finished off his ethereal donut with a sigh. “You’re no fun when you’re sad. Alright, how exactly is Purple McBookface missing?”

“We think she’s trapped in another universe,” Fluttershy said. “I thought that you might be able to help.”

Discord stretched his lion’s paw out the window and retrieved his wayward eyebrows so he could properly raise one. With his claw, he stroked his goatee before he snapped and turned himself into a pickle. “Yes, I can see how that might put you in a bit of a pickle.”

Fluttershy continued to give him a deadpan stare. “This is serious, Discord. We don’t have the time for jokes.”

Discord rolled his eyes and they turned into those of a snake as he grew back to his natural form. “Fine, you’re under a lot of stress, so I guess pickle Discord isn’t the funniest crap you’ve ever seen.”

“Can. You. Help?” Fluttershy asked again.

Discord stretched and cracked his knuckles. “Oh, I can. But I can’t promise anything. The multiverse is a big place, so it might take me some time to track her down.”

“But you will?” Fluttershy pleaded, looking up at him as tears started welling up in her eyes.

Discord grinned. “Now how could I say no to that face?”

Fluttershy launched herself across her tea table to tightly embrace him. “Thank you, Discord!”

He laughed and slithered out of her forelegs, leaving her fluttering in midair. “It’s not a problem, my dear. Now,” he manifested a tophat, monocle, and cane, “I do believe I have a princess to track down. Tally-ho!”

Discord hummed to himself as he traversed the In-Between. The space between universes would drive a mortal mad, make them explode, make them implode, violently rip them to shreds, collapse them into a black hole, and cause all other manners of nasty ways to go simultaneously. But for Discord, who breathed chaos and sometimes ate light, existing here was child’s play. Hell, Equus wasn’t even in his home universe–he had long since forgotten his origin in his billions of years of living–he just liked it there.

As he jauntily waved to the Endless Abyss and Cthulhu, he considered his options. He hadn’t lied to Fluttershy when he said it would take some time for him to find Sparklepants. That time was just somewhere in the range of three seconds. This little corner of the omniverse practically ran on chaos, after all, and he was naught but chaos incarnate. If he put his mind to it, he could find just about anything in it as he bent the fabric of unreality to his will. In fact, he had figured out where Twilight was just moments after Fluttershy said she was missing.

There was just one problem with getting her back: which universe she was in. Or, perhaps more accurately, whose universe.

Discord hadn’t spoken with Void in over ten thousand years, well before the latter had locked down Its multiverse and vanished. Nothing could get in or out of the five or so universes It had created. Oh, they could probably interact with each other, of course–he had sensed creatures moving around in there before–but they were completely isolated from the greater omniverse. Even Discord still wasn’t able to break through when he tried to.

Frankly, he was impressed and a bit scared that Sparkle had managed it. Though, he reasoned, if she had managed to get through, the multiversal embargo must be weakening a bit, right? Grinning, he sharpened his claw and pierced through the nothing that comprised the In-Between. It wouldn’t be a deep scratch, but it would be enough to at least view the going-ons in one of Void’s universes.

Sure enough, a yellow, star-shaped planet came into view. Discord moved his arms a bit, widening his window to a 16:9 aspect ratio. Satisfied, he snapped his fingers and summoned the frame of a flatscreen television around it and a recliner. Perhaps he’d tell Fluttershy about this later, he thought as he manifested a bowl of popcorn and leaned back. The other girls too, but only if they thought to ask him. He was petty like that.

For now though, he had a show to watch. It seemed the plot was getting good.

The bridge of the Halberd was a simple design, built for practicality over aesthetics. Consoles displaying all sorts of necessary metrics for a flying battleship were spread across the room, with a massive window displaying the front of the ship and Orange Ocean ahead of them. “Sailor Waddle Dee, status report,” Meta Knight demanded as he entered the bridge.

The Dee whirled around with a salute. “All systems are ready and we’re go to fly, Sir,” she stated.

Meta Knight nodded and turned to Captain Vul. “Captain?”

“The crew’s been ready for this for days,” Vul responded. “It’s time.”

Vul’s communicator crackled to life. “Sir!” Axe Knight shouted over the line. “Kirby’s been sighted coming our way!”

Vul and Sailor Dee turned to their leader. “Your call, Sir,” Vul said.

Meta Knight stared out the window for a moment. “Prepare to launch.”

Sailor moved over to her console. “Output is normal for Reactors One, Two, and Three and holding steady,” she confirmed before pressing a button. “Raising anchor and checking our anti-grav. How are things looking on your end, Vul?”

“Our backup solar battery is at 288 of 300 and all equipment has been cleared from the docks,” he said. “We’re ready to extend our wings.”

“Anti-gravity is at full efficiency!” Sailor happily confirmed as the Halberd’s wings extended to their full glory. “Lift off in T-minus thirty seconds.”

Meta Knight pressed down on his microphone, broadcasting to the entire ship. “Attention all Meta-Knights. Today is the day you all have been training for. Today, we show the world our combined might!”

“Twenty seconds.”

“Today, the time has come to show our power! We will not stand to be ruled over by a lazy, tyrant king! The lazy life of Dreamlanders has come to an end!”

“Ten seconds!”

“Today, we strike! Tomorrow, we rule!”

“Five!” Sailor shouted, and Meta smiled as he heard cheering come from below deck.

“Four!” Sailor shouted, and Vul grinned as he thought of the glory their conquest would bring.

“Three!” Sailor shouted, and her eyes glistened as she dreamed of liberating her kind from Dedede’s rule.

“Two!” Sailor shouted, and Meta Knight pointed his sword forward towards the window, pointing onwards to a new future.

“One!” Sailor shouted, and she pushed the throttle upward. With a shudder, the ship began to rise. “We have lift off!”

Author's Note

"Well, that was a nice interlude. Probably somewhere around 2,000 words... Oh. Nevermind, then. Five thousand it is." - Me after finishing this chapter.

Equestria hasn't been idle while Twilight and the others muck about in Dreamland. Celestia and Luna are trying to prevent political upheaval, but with Fluttershy getting a barely post-reform Discord involved and Glim Glam happening early, that might not last long. And without Twilight's mediating influence, AJ and RD have already nearly come to blows, complicating matters even further.

On the matter of Sailor Waddle Dee's gender, I've seen conflicting information. The Kirby Wiki and TV Tropes both list it as male, but most fan works I've seen have had Sailor be female. Having just played through Super Star, I didn't see anything that indicated either way, so I went with her being a girl to balance out the ratio a bit in the Meta-Knights.

But for now, let us put Equestria behind us. It's time to return to Popstar for next time's Revenge of Meta Knight!

Chapter V: Scuffle in the Sky

“And next on our tour is Dreamland’s very own Orange Ocean!” Bandana Waddle Dee proudly stated. King Dedede had asked him to show the three extradimensional travelers around now that they had settled in a bit, a task that the general took to with gusto. He had already shown off the mountain chain Mount Dedede rested in, Green Greens, and the Float Islands in the several hours the tour had been going on. They were currently making their way north along the coast towards the planned final stop of their tour, Rainbow Resort, where they would be spending the night. For now, though, they were stopping for dinner at Orange Ocean.

Spike squinted out at the body of water. “How’d it get the name? It doesn’t seem very orange.”

True, the waves sparkled a clear blue in the late afternoon sun. “Just wait until the sun really starts setting,” Bandana said. “With how the light reflects off of Rainbow Resort’s ice spikes, this whole bay practically glows!”

“Huh, neat,” Sunset noted as she glanced around. She did a double take after her eyes passed over a patch of sky, though. “Sick! You guys have a flying battleship?”

Bandee blinked. “What? Kabula might count, but what do you…” he trailed off as he turned around. “Oh no.”

In the sky was a massive purple winged warship, its bow designed to resemble some sort of mask. The ship was armed to the teeth by way of being absolutely covered in artillery of all shapes and sizes. As the behemoth of a war machine moved through the sky, Twilight idly wondered how it was staying in the air.

She frowned. “That’s not promising.”

Bandee gulped. “Well, I guess we know why the Meta-Knights have been so quiet for the past few weeks.”

“The who?” Sunset asked.

“They’re a militant extremist group led by the alien Meta Knight,” Bandana explained. “No one knows when or why he came to Popstar, but ever since Dedede took over Dreamland he’s been a constant thorn in our side. The whole organization dropped off the map two weeks ago, though.” He looked back up at the flying fortress, gripped his spear, and shivered. “I guess they spent their time building that.”

“We have to stop them!” Spike shouted.

“Agreed,” Twilight said. “Any ideas?”

“Well, I don’t exactly have any ideas for how to take down a giant flying warship, but uh…” Sunset pointed up at the ship, which had trained its main canon at something in midair and began to fire. “What are they shooting at?”

Twilight narrowed her eyes and cast a farsight spell. “It looks like a…flying star?”

“Is it yellow?” Bandee asked.

“Very.”

Bandana Dee sighed in relief. “It’s Kirby on his Warp Star, then. He’ll take care of-”

“He just got shot down,” Twilight interrupted.

Bandee and Sunset both whirled around to stare at her with wide eyes. “He WHAT?” they shouted simultaneously.

“His Warp Star got hit and just went poof,” Twilight said. “Based on his trajectory, he should be landing over there right about…now.”

She pointed a hoof over to their left, where a few hundred meters away, a plume of dust shot into the air from in between the trees. Spike was running towards it near-immediately. “Come on!” he shouted as he vanished into the treeline. “We’ve gotta go help him!”

“Spike!” Twilight called, running after him and also disappearing into the foliage. “Hold on a moment! We need a plan!”

Sunset and Bandee glanced at each other before looking back to the plume of dust. “I guess we’re helping Kirby, now?” she asked.

Bandee twirled his spear and began walking forward. “The King and he called a truce. If he’s willing to help us fight off the Meta-Knights, I’ll be glad to aid him.”

When Twilight and Spike found Kirby a minute or so later, she noted that he was remarkably well put-together for someone who had just been launched a few kilometers at a high velocity. Which was to say, he was somehow completely undamaged. The puffball was even wearing a headset of some sort, for goodness sake! If he could take this much punishment without any problems, she was starting to see why Sunset was so scared of him.

Kirby glared up at the ship that had grounded him with fury in his eyes, though he still happily waved to Twilight and Spike when he saw them, and to Sunset and Bandee when some of the foliage rustled and they joined them in the clearing.

Sunset very pointedly stood on the opposite side of it from Kirby.

The pink ball didn’t seem to mind, though. Instead, after giving them a wave of greeting, he continued scanning the sky for something. That something turned out to be the silhouette of a massive bird of some sort that his eyes glistened when he saw, and he began jumping up and down. Curiously, he turned to Twilight, pointed upward, and jumped.

She looked at him, a bit confused. “You want me to lift you up a bit?”

Kirby vigorously nodded.

Twilight shrugged. “Alright then.”

Her horn lit and she levitated him above the canopy. She wasn’t entirely sure what he was planning to do when he twisted himself around in her grip so he could face upward, but the microphone he produced from somewhere was concerning. She had a right to be a bit worried, it seemed, when he raised the microphone to his lips and SCREAMED.

Everyone present cringed and covered their ears, the two ponies even crying out in a bit of pain. It was so much that Twilight reflexively dropped Kirby, though she did recover quickly enough to send a cushioning charm his way. Not that it looked like he needed it, since he just gently floated down to the ground. He smiled up at the wincing group, pleased about whatever it was he did.

What that was became clear moments later, and a massive crashing sound reverberated around them. The giant bird had landed, taking down a couple trees in the process. Looking at it, Twilight’s eyes widened. It seemed to be covered in a beautiful cherry red armor, a massive blue gem embedded in its chest. Its wings were every color of the rainbow and ended in enormous blades. Its gigantic talons, some of the sharpest things she’d ever seen, sank deep into the ground.

“Th…that’s Dyna Blade!” Bandee exclaimed. “Why’d Kirby call her here?”

Then she cooed at Kirby, and the illusion of a threat shattered.

Kirby and Dyna Blade seemed to have a silent conversation of sorts, the former gesturing wildly and pointing at the still-visible form of the battleship. Dyna Blade, for her part, nodded in understanding and crouched down as she extended her wings. Kirby quickly clamored onto her back, gesturing for the others to follow.

No one moved for a moment, but Sunset broke the silence with a shrug. “Y’know what, I’m done questioning these things,” she said as she moved towards the enormous bird, keeping an eye on Kirby all the while. “I guess we’re fighting a battleship now. Now that’s a sentence I never thought I’d say.”

Bandee moved forward next, vaulting on his spear to hop onto Dyna Blade’s back just as Sunset began to board. “I’ll do whatever it takes to help defend Dreamland!”

When Spike moved forward, though, he found himself blocked by a violet wing. “Not you, Spike,” Twilight said.

“Why not?” Spike protested. “I want to help!”

Twilight frowned. “You’re not even eleven yet, Spike. I am not allowing you to put yourself in this kind of danger!” Her expression softened. “You can still help, though. We still need somepony to run back to the castle and let Dedede know what’s going on!”

Spike sighed. “Okay. I get that,” he admitted. Before he left, though, he gave Twilight a hug. “Come back safe, please?”

Twilight wrapped a wing around her little brother. “Of course. You know the way back, right?”

Spike rolled his eyes and pointed a thumb over his shoulder, where Castle Dedede was plainly visible in the distance. Twilight released him and smiled sheepishly in response. No more words needed to be exchanged between them, though, as Spike gave her a determined nod and took off towards the mountains.

“You coming, Twilight?” Sunset asked after the dragon had vanished back into the underbrush.

Twilight spread her wings and unsteadily took to the air. She smiled at them. “I’ve been meaning to practice flying more, anyway.”

“Are you sure this is the sort of situation you want to try that in?” Bandee asked.

Twilight nodded. “As an alicorn, I have access to both pegasus and earth pony magic,” she explained. Looking up at their target, she focused. She hadn’t given it much thought before, but ever since she ascended, she could feel the air. Every gust of wind, every thermal updraft, every tiny eddy that circled around her. She could feel them all.

To anypony else, gaining an entire new sense like that might have been overwhelming. And yes, she had been caught off guard for a few minutes after she first ascended, but she was Twilight Sparkle. With how many experiments she had done on unicorn magic, gaining extra sensory data streams to her brain was nothing new to her.

Manipulating air with pegasus magic was harder, but nowhere near impossible. Regular pegasi did it mostly subconsciously, like when Rainbow messed with her mach cone to make breaking the sound barrier easier. Normal pegasus magic, though, simply wasn’t strong enough to do much of anything else with the surrounding gasses. If one were to try it as an alicorn, however…

Twilight grinned as she felt an updraft carry her higher. “I have all this new magic that I need to try out. And hey, if I do mess up,” she lit her horn, “I can always fall back on my unicorn magic to help.”

Dyna Blade cawed, and the group shot into the air.

Twilight’s smile split her face as she felt the wind rush by her ears. She wasn’t normally one to have adrenaline junkie tendencies, but she was raised by Twilight Velvet. Really, it was a wonder that she hadn’t tried something like this before; it was exhilarating.

She still wasn’t going to go down Neighagra Falls in a barrel, though, no matter how many times her mother tried to convince her.

Regardless, she could feel the adrenaline coursing through her veins as they approached the battleship. Now that she could get a closer look, she reassessed it. It was far larger than she first assumed, looking to be several hundred meters in length at the least. Its superstructure over doubled its height, and its wings stretched out nearly as wide as it was long. Its main cannon dominated the middle of the ship, and of course it was pointed directly at the approaching group.

Then it started firing.

Twilight and Dyna Blade dove to avoid the explosive projectile, swooping under the ship as they started to circle towards the stern. “How are we gonna take this thing down?” Sunset shouted over the roar of the wind.

“I was thinking of taking out the engines!” Twilight shouted back. “But they’re probably the most fortified part of the ship! We might want to keep that as a backup plan!”

“What do you suggest?” Bandana called, one arm holding on to Dyna Blade for dear life as his namesake flapped in the wind.

Twilight considered that as they started ascending the port side of the ship. Her eyes trained on the side cannons as they began tracking them. “Get back to the bow and try to board from the front!” she commanded. “I’ll try to keep their aerial defenses trained on me until you can take out the main cannon!”

Dyna Blade nodded in understanding, and the group split. The bird and her passengers headed for the bow, where hopefully they would be able to fight their way to and destroy the ship’s main cannon. As for Twilight, she flew straight up and began charging energy in her horn.

Hopefully this works, she thought.

Unfortunately, the ship’s commanders must have seen her charging up for a strike, as the majority of the mounted artillery turned towards her.

The onslaught began.

Twilight was forced to cancel her spell and focus entirely on dodging the variety of projectiles the ship fired at her. Most were conventional shells, but it seemed that the Meta-Knights also had access to some sort of energy weapon. Whatever laser cannon they were using to fire them was capable of rapidfire too, apparently. Twilight had to pull in both of her wings and enter a free fall for a bit to avoid them. Safely dodging the first volley, she extended her wings once more and flapped, rocketing forward and up towards what she assumed was the bridge.

Well, she certainly had their attention.

The world blurred as she sped by. Unfortunately, she couldn’t really concentrate enough to pull together enough energy to seriously damage any part of the ship, so she was reduced to relying on her instincts to dodge. As she arced in front of the bridge’s massive window, laser fire trailing behind her, she spared a glance inside.

The being she assumed was Meta Knight was staring directly at her, a sword in his grip and…was that amusement in his eyes? Also present on the bridge were a Waddle Dee in a sailor’s cap, a bipedal bird of some sort in captain’s garb, what looked like a walking skull holding an axe, and someone in purple armor. As she watched, she could see the bird shouting into a communicator, but that was all she got to see before she had to focus on dodging again.

Circling over to the ship’s starboard, she banked right and felt an explosion of heat from behind her as she dove under the wing. They must have shot some sort of explosive at her that just barely missed. She paled a bit at how close she had come to legitimately dying there, but steeled herself and kept pushing forward. Having successfully cleared the massive bat-like structure, she shot back up towards the ship’s stern, and the engines’ massive roar started overpowering that of the wind.

Getting a look at the thrusters, she was nearly hit by the next shot fired at her when she froze in astonishment. It was a technological marvel! Six great jets of flame shot out from the ship’s stern, pushing it forward through the air. She wondered how they were powered, and how the thing even stayed afloat. If it wasn’t an existential threat to Dreamland, she would’ve felt bad for trying to destroy it.

Unfortunately, though, she wouldn’t even get the chance to go after the engines. Her original assessment of them being heavily fortified was correct, and it wasn’t the usual mounted artillery of the rest of the ship. Instead, the ship seemed to double as a carrier. The thrusters were positioned above a massive hangar, the door of which was currently opening.

Out of it flew a miniature fighter aircraft. Twilight, being an Equestrian, wasn’t exactly familiar with the concept of planes, but a kitted out flying hunk of metal coming right for her was intimidating all the same. It was just the one, thankfully–it seemed that the Meta-Knights didn’t have the resources to spend on more–but it instantly started shooting at Twilight. She yelped and dove, dodging the projectiles and engaging in a dogfight.

Fortunately, it looked like it could only fire in one direction, and she could actually catch her breath as she rose up behind it. Gathering up energy in her horn again, she launched a blast. The pilot apparently saw it coming, though, banking left hard enough to avoid it. Twilight frowned. This machine was small enough that it could avoid just about anything she threw at it, so she’d need to do something impossible to dodge, or get creative.

Or, she grinned, I could do both.

The aircraft had turned its bank into half a barrel roll and flipped around to face her by the time she’d come up with a plan, though. It fired at her once again, and she tucked her wings into a roll to get under it. With the gunfire dodged for the time being, she called upon the pegasus magic she had access to. She still wasn’t able to do anything spectacular with it–no tornadoes for her, at least not yet–but a sudden crosswind was enough to cause her pursuer extreme turbulence. Following that, she gathered magic in her horn again and fired.

There was a reason Twilight bore the Element of Magic.

The massive beam of magic vaporized the plane’s left wing and left Twilight no more tired than before. The aircraft fell into a tailspin without its wing, plummeting down towards the ocean far below. Twilight was about to try and stop it to save whoever was inside, because she was nice like that, but the cockpit’s roof splitting open and the pilot ejecting stopped her. She blinked as she looked at said pilot. This was a new creature!

It had the same general build as the Waddle Dees and Waddle Doos she had encountered, but was covered in orangish-yellow armor. It had a shark-like helmet, and Twilight could make out its glowing eyes behind its visor. Most interestingly, though, it was wearing a jetpack that it was using to hover at her level.

Then it charged directly at her, and she barely got a shield up in time.

The creature spoke no words as it bounced off of her shield, but Twilight got the feeling that it was scowling at her. She prepared herself for another strike, but it seemed that the pilot simply gave up after one attempt and fled back to the ship. Twilight smiled as the hangar door closed. Maybe with the lack of mounted artillery on the stern, she could take out the engines and end this early!

Regrettably, that was not to be. The engines’ true defenses appeared not long after, and Twilight suddenly had to deal with half a dozen heat-seeking missiles.

Twilight yelped again and managed to shoot down two of the missiles with magical lasers, but was forced to physically dodge the other four. They tracked after her even as she accelerated by flying downward, and she glanced behind her as she moved underneath the ship. They were unfortunately small enough that inertia wasn’t a problem for them, so she couldn’t just make a sharp turn and force them to hit the ship itself. But then an idea started forming in her head. Perhaps she could still get the ship to destroy the missiles!

She darted to her left and ascended the port side of the ship again. Predictably, it started shooting at her, but a series of explosions sounded out as the missiles following her were caught in the cannon fire and detonated. Twilight mentally cheered. She’d survived so far, but she definitely wasn’t going to be heading back to the stern anytime soon.

The laser cannon started firing at her again, and Twilight began her routine of dodging it as she hoped the others were at least faring better.

“Shit! We’re hit!” Sunset cried as Dyna Blade began a descent towards the main deck. Despite most of the ship’s side cannons focusing on Twilight, it seemed that the main cannon had stayed squarely trained on the enormous bird.

“We’re gonna have to jump to the deck so Dyna Blade can get out of here and recover!” Bandee shouted.

Kirby said nothing, but nodded in agreement.

Sunset rolled her neck. They were fast approaching, but Dyna Blade would have to pull up soon to stop them from crashing straight into the ship. “Alright, then!” She flared her magic, and on the deck a rectangular prism of aquamarine light formed. “That’s our target! The charm I just cast should cushion our fall!”

The three steeled themselves, and just as Dyna Blade was starting to ascend again, they jumped. Sunset and Bandee both landed on her static featherfall charm, but Kirby just ignored the damn thing and landed with a high-speed roll.

Sunset nearly rolled her eyes. Show-off.

At least it looked like a straight shot down the deck to the main cannon. With how likely they would be to damage their own ship, she reasoned that the Meta-Knights wouldn’t dare use the cannon on them while they were on the deck. Unfortunately, that meant that they’d probably have a different plan.

The ship’s PA system crackled to life around them as a message from the bridge came through. “Dyna Blade is down! I repeat, Dyna Blade is down!” came a somewhat high male voice.

“Kirby and his pals are on the deck, though!” shouted a deeper one.

“Stay calm and stick to the plan,” sounded a third voice. Based on how suave and smooth it sounded, Sunset assumed that this had to be Meta Knight.

“All soldiers near the deck, get up there and assume combat positions!” shouted a gruff, stern voice. “Defend the Halberd at all costs!”

Quite suddenly, their way forward was flooded with members of the Meta-Knights. Bandee twirled his spear, Kirby inhaled a bird-like creature, and Sunset grinned. This was gonna be fun.

The battle that followed was carnage. Kirby took to the air almost instantly after he got a hat made mostly of feathers, taking care of most of the flying mooks. Sunset and Bandana Dee pushed forward together as the ground troops rushed them. She scoffed. Amateurs.

Two creatures wielding a trident and a cutter blade rushed them, to start. A Trident Knight and Sir Kibble, if Sunset’s memory of her introduction to others of their species served her right. Kibble’s blade was snapped in half by her magic almost as soon as he threw it, and she quickly picked him up in her aura and knocked him out on the floor.

Bandee had engaged in a proper fight with the Trident Knight, though. The two’s longer-ranged weapons served as counters to each other, neither able to get a hit in. Their stalemate came to an end, though, when Bandee successfully parried a hit hard enough to actually disarm the knight. While they were disoriented, he shifted his spear up and bonked them over the head, dropping the Trident Knight like a sack of bricks.

“I take it you don’t really like to kill, either?” Sunset asked, noting that he had specifically avoided hitting with the spearhead.

“Not really,” Bandee replied. “It just doesn't feel right, even during a battle like this.”

The PA sounded again, this time seeming to direct a statement directly at them. “Tch, classic Bandana Dee, the pacifist general,” sounded a mocking, feminine voice. “Willing to be a bootlicker but not able to get his hands dirty.”

“Stay focused, Sailor,” Meta Knight said, and the PA shut off again.

Bandee narrowed his eyes. “Of course she would be here,” he growled as they moved towards the next group of enemies.

“Personal history?” Sunset asked, ducking under a Knuckle Joe’s strike and blasting him with some magic.

Bandee twirled around a Wheelie and knocked it onto its side. “You could say that. Sailor Waddle Dee and I used to be friends, but we had a bit of a falling out when Dedede rose to power.”

“Sounds rough, buddy,” Sunset said as she grabbed a bird-like being in her magic. The thing was about to strike Kirby from behind, but she put an end to that real quick. Twisting her head a bit, she slammed it onto the deck, knocking it unconscious.

The two fell silent after that, slowly working their way across the deck and towards the main cannon. It only took them a few minutes to plow through the mooks, but Sunset was continually surprised by just how many troops Meta Knight had at his disposal. As they neared the massive artillery piece, though, the PA started up again. “They’re nearing the main cannon!”

“Disengage the twin cannon and fire at them!” demanded the gruff voice again.

“Vetoed, Captain Vul,” Meta Knight shot him down. “That could still damage the hull.”

“Not if we lower the power by thirty percent,” pointed out the same voice that had confirmed Dyna Blade’s retreat.

Meta Knight hummed. “Yes, that could work. Thank you, Axe Knight. Captain, proceed.”

Vul laughed as Kirby landed next to Bandee and Sunset, still decked out in his feathered headdress. “Prepare to get blown to smithereens, you three!”

A small pair of side cannons detached themselves from the larger, main cannon and pointed at the group. Sunset and Bandee jumped back as a massive projectile slammed into the ground where they just were with a clanging sound. Kirby, though, rushed up and shot a feather at the larger of the two. Predictably, it did nothing and just bounced off of the metal.

Frowning, Bandee dashed forward and tried to jab at it with his spear, which just glanced off of it. He was forced to run away soon after, when the smaller top cannon started spewing machine gun fire at him. Sunset’s horn flared, erecting a shield around the small spearman. Thankfully it was enough to stop the bullets in their tracks, the spent shells clattering to the floor as the small canon stopped firing.

Sunset’s own attempt at destroying the twin cannon didn’t go any better, but she wanted to test something. Her weak beam of magic hit the top cannon and was deflected into the sky, of course, but that was the point. She knew that if she had something like this, she’d have an irresistible urge to gloat about her toys. So maybe…

Vul cackled, and Sunset mentally grinned. “You three have no hope of destroying the twin cannon!” he shouted.

“It’s made of reinforced steel tempered with water from the Fountain of Dreams!” Axe Knight added. “Nothing you could do can pierce it!”

Sunset was physically grinning, now. “Tempered, you say?” Her horn shone brightly, aquamarine magic sparking around it. She felt a bit of a dull heat from her cutie mark as she tapped into her special talent and the twin cannon began to glow a dull red. “So it can melt?”

The sound of panic in the bridge spread over the PA system, and the top cannon swiveled to point at Sunset. But it was already too late, for when they tried to fire it, the barrel was already being reduced to melted slag. Instead, all that they succeeded in doing was igniting all the gunpowder at once, and what once was a contained explosion became very much uncontained.

Sunset quickly shifted to shielding herself and her allies as the twin cannon violently exploded, sending molten steel every which way. It wasn’t done there, though, as the explosion took out significant proportions of the main cannon as well. The barrel was even ripped off from the sheer force of it, spiraling off the Halberd. A few seconds later, they heard a mighty splash as it hit the water.

God she loved having a cutie mark in blowing shit up. Well, technically it was pyroturgy as a whole, but same difference.

“The main cannon has been destroyed!” shouted the only unidentified voice from the bridge.

“Thank you, Mace Knight, for STATING THE OBVIOUS!” Vul screeched.

“You are welcome, Sir.”

Vul’s next words were less coherent language and more indecipherable rage.

Twilight landed next to them, sweating bullets and panting hard. It seemed that the princess had to use all of her strength just to keep herself standing. “I didn’t even know,” she gasped between breaths, “that my wings could hurt so much. I’m walking the rest of the time we’re here.”

“Thank you for keeping most of the guns away from us, Your Highness!” Bandee said.

Twilight stood there and caught her breath for a few more seconds. “You’re welcome. I’m not doing that again.” She looked around. “That's a lot of molten metal.”

Sunset beamed. “That was me! Pity nothing's on fire, though.”

Twilight sent Sunset a confused look as she laughed and dove through the door that Kirby had yanked open, entering the Halberd's interior.

Author's Note

The Revenge of Meta Knight has begun! Buckle your seatbelts, everyone, 'cause this battleship is hitting some heavy turbulence!

Twilight's main problem when it comes to her own powers is that she constantly underestimates herself and overthinks what she can and cannot do. When she starts going by instinct, her full might as Equestria's–for all intents and purposes–goddess of magic becomes apparent. Hence her pulling off dodging around the Halberd while under constant fire for several minutes.

This chapter, Scuffle in the Sky, is only the first part this story's Revenge of Meta Knight! In fact, because of my tendency to keep adding things as I write, this arc will have at least three main chapters and a fourth aftermath chapter, so stay tuned! Because next up will be chapter six: Havoc Aboard the Halberd!

Chapter VI: Havoc Aboard the Halberd

The Halberd’s interior had a far more Spartan design than its hull. Where its exterior was an extravagant display of the Meta-Knights' power, the inside was gray hallway after gray hallway. The labyrinthine corridors would have been nearly unnavigable, but thankfully it seemed that the crew needed a map to get around as much as the boarding party did. A massive map adorned the wall near where they had entered.

Bandana Dee pointed his spear at a part of it. “It looks like we’re here. What’s the plan now that we’re inside?”

Twilight frowned at the display of the ship. “Ideally we could just head up to the bridge, but I don’t think any of us can safely land this thing. We’re going to have to force a crash and get out of here.”

Sunset squinted at the map. “Looks like the closest vital structure to us is the left wing-”

“Port wing,” Twilight corrected.

“I don’t think we have time for semantics,” Sunset countered before getting back on topic. “I’m not sure how we’ll destroy it, though. Destroying the twin cannon took a lot out of me and I don’t think I can pull off something like that for the entire wing.”

Kirby grinned and pointed to himself.

Twilight pursed her lips. “You sure about that, little guy? I can probably help out with that with my magic.”

Kirby huffed, seemingly offended.

Sunset shivered. She would forever associate that expression with her nose being broken. “I wouldn’t doubt him,” She warned. “He can probably do it.”

Twilight frowned, but relented. “Alright, then.” She looked back at the map. “After that, we should probably take out the starboard wing and then the reactor. I should be able to levitate us back to shore as soon as we’re back outside.”

“You do realize that we can still hear you, right?” Sailor Waddle Dee asked over the PA.

Sunset responded by staring directly at the nearest camera and sticking her tongue out at it. Sure, it was unprofessional, but hearing Vul’s indignant screeches of rage was worth it.

With that, the quartet began advancing. Strangely, they encountered very little resistance for the first few minutes of their travel, only being impeded by a single Poppy Bros Junior that fell to Kirby in seconds. Sunset had to wonder just where everyone was. Perhaps they had exhausted their troops on the deck?

“Soldiers near the port wing, prepare yourselves,” Meta Knight’s voice echoed around them. “Kirby and his companions are approaching your position.”

Ah, they were just waiting for them to get closer. She probably should have expected that.

Almost immediately, a few dozen troops rushed around the corner and charged at them. Sunset thought she could make out what looked like a couple Poppy Bros, a few Trident Knights, at least one Waddle Doo, and several others, but the exact makeup of the attack force hardly mattered. They had a fight to win.

The first thing to reach them was a bomb lobbed by one of the Poppy Bros, but Bandana Dee batted it aside with his spear easily enough. The fact that it detonated without so much as denting the wall it hit, though, did speak to the structural integrity of the ship. Sunset decided that she would have to ask about what this Fountain of Dreams thing was after this was over; clearly its magical properties were useful.

A cutter blade lashed out at them, and Sunset was drawn back into battle. A quick application of telekinesis later, and the Sir Kibble that threw it was slammed unconscious into the wall. As she ducked under a Trident Knight’s strike and shot a jet of flame at him, she took in what her allies were doing.

Bandee had made short work of most of his opponents based on the trail of three knocked-out bodies behind him. Really, what two Gims and a Sir Kibble thought they were going to do against him was beyond her. Currently, he was stalled by another Poppy Bros Junior. The two were engaged in a deadly game of tennis, slapping a lit bomb back and forth between them. Bandana, though, gained the upper hand when he slapped it back down at the Poppy Bros’s feet and it detonated, launching the unfortunate enemy into the wall and knocking him unconscious.

She spun around a shot from a Plasma Wisp, which spilled off the ground and dispersed. Sunset responded by shooting a cooling charm its way, rendering its plasma-based attacks useless and forcing it to retreat. Sparing a glance at Kirby, her jaw dropped.

He was like a force of nature, tearing through enemy after enemy. Even in this confined space where his bird-like ability couldn’t be used to its full effect, nothing could even land a hit on him! As she watched, a Trident Knight, at this point the thirteenth enemy Kirby had faced in the thirty or so seconds since the fight began, tried to get close enough to stab him. Kirby, in response, grabbed him, took to the air, and slammed the knight into the ceiling.

He landed at the same time as the Trident Knight hit the floor, ready to move on to his next target, when a voice shouted something that stalled pretty much the entire battle.

“Beam attack!”

Everyone turned to the Waddle Doo that had shouted. He had attempted to use his species’ signature attack on Kirby, but apparently misjudged the distance. Instead, his beam hit the floor just short of his target.

“Oh, I missed,” he stated the obvious. “I’ll get you next time, Kirby! Beam attack!”

He hadn’t moved, so the attack went wide again. At this point even some of his compatriots were snickering. Sunset just thought it was kind of sad.

The Waddle Doo laughed nervously. “Maybe this one’ll hit you! Beam atta- GAH!”

Before he could make a third pitiful attempt at an attack, Kirby struck. A veritable wave of feathers spilled out from the wings around him, forcing the Waddle Doo to close his eye and swat at them until Kirby just walked up and punched him.

A facepalm resounded through the PA system. “That’s who you were planning on promoting?” Vul exasperatedly said.

“He’s enthusiastic!” Axe Knight defended, but Sunset could hear that he didn’t really believe what he was saying.

Discord snapped a photo of the passed out Waddle Doo on his screen. “Yep, that’s going in my cringe compilation.”

A javelin nearly speared Sunset while she was distracted, and she was drawn back into the fight. As she made quick work of the Javelin Knight that had attempted to take her out, she finally glanced back at Twilight. Her face fell.

The princess hadn’t even moved since the fight started, her eyes flicking around in a mixture of horror and disappointment. Sunset supposed that it shouldn’t really surprise her, though. Equestria hadn’t been involved in any international conflicts in over six hundred years to her knowledge, so most ponies were rather averse to fighting in anything more than self-defense. The Halberd may have been on its way to attack Dreamland, but they were still essentially preemptively striking against it. It must not have meshed well with Twilight's sensibilities.

Still, though, Sunset had to break her out of her stupor somehow. “Hey, Twilight!” she called. “You gonna do something or what?”

She didn’t respond, her eyes locked onto the utter carnage that Kirby was dishing out. Another five enemies had fallen to his fury in the time since the Waddle Doo went down.

“Is she a pacifist or something?” Axe Knight speculated over the PA.

“With how she took down that Capsule J2’s fighter?” Sailor added. “Not likely. Must be a psychological thing.”

“I have seen reactions like this before,” Meta Knight said. “No matter. This only makes defending the Halberd easier.”

As Sunset watched, a Knuckle Joe inched towards Twilight. She was about to open her mouth to warn the princess as he got within striking distance, but it turned out to be unnecessary. Twilight had apparently felt the air move as the fighter prepared to strike and reacted on instinct. She whirled around to face him and sent a right hook his way with what Sunset assumed was some earth pony magic behind it. Considering that his body hit the wall hard enough to actually dent it, it was likely.

Twilight stared down at her hoof with wide eyes, horrified. She looked up at the unmoving form of the Knuckle Joe, seemingly too stunned to move. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out as she processed what had just happened.

Sunset winced. Yeah, that Joe was dead and Twilight had some trauma to work through. There was no way anything was surviving a blow from an alicorn like tha-

Oh, never mind. He was still breathing. The hell?

Alright, that’s another thing to put on my list of “reasons to get the fuck off this planet,” Sunset thought. Apparently this kind of insane durability isn’t just limited to Kirby and Dedede.

She glanced back at the unconscious forms of the Meta-Knights littering the hallway. Bandee and Kirby seemed to have taken care of the rest of them in the meantime, the latter having exchanged his feathered hat for a red headband at some point. Sunset looked back to Twilight and sighed.

Lighting her horn, she picked up the stunned alicorn in her telekinesis. Twilight cried out in surprise and immediately broke out of it, but the action still accomplished what Sunset had intended it to. “Alright, Twilight,” she stated as it seemed the princess was lucid again. “The dude’s alive, so don’t worry about that. But we need to move.”

“I…” Twilight took a deep breath. “Sorry. I just haven’t hurt something that bad since the Changelings attacked Canterlot and at that point they were already attacking civilians in the city and-”

“Hey, I get it,” Bandana Dee comforted. “Fighting other sapient beings is hard on the soul. But we can worry about it later, because right now we need to stop this ship from reaching Dreamland!”

Twilight took another deep breath, fluffed her wings a bit, and steeled her expression. “You’re right. We have more important things to worry about right now than ponies’ natural tendency towards pacifism. Let’s take out the wing.”

They were able to move unhindered through the next section of the Halberd, the mooks on the ship’s left side apparently depleted. Within a minute, they came upon an exterior door and went through, reaching the platform underneath the left wing. The wind’s roar once more overtook Sunset’s ears as she looked over the edge. From this vantage point, she could see almost all of Dreamland. It felt strange to be fighting in defense of a nation instead of trying to take it over, but she supposed that she could get used to it.

She blinked. Where had that thought come from?

Bandana Dee shouting at them pulled her out of her musings before she could properly start psychoanalyzing herself, though. “How are we gonna destroy this thing?” he shouted, staring up at the massive form of the wing.

Before they could start tossing out ideas, however, the door they just came through flung open. “Stop right there!” shouted a Mister Frosty.

Joining him were a Poppy Bros Senior and a Jukid. “You’re not gonna even be able to touch that wing!” the latter claimed.

Kirby rushed into the fray, targeting the Jukid with a spinning kick that he just barely blocked with one of his hands. “Twilight, focus on charging up something powerful enough to take out the wing!” Sunset shouted before lighting her horn and sending a jet of flame towards Frosty. “We’ll protect you in the meantime!”

Bandee sighed, shifted his spear so he was holding it like a baseball bat, and turned to the Poppy Bros. “Guess I’m doing this again.”

Sunset’s flame met the massive snowball Frosty had sent Kirby’s way, melting it into an ineffectual puddle in mere moments. Infuriated, Frosty turned to her and charged. She twirled out of the way as magic sparked around her horn, and she shot a fireball. It caught him in the back as he ran by her, sending him crashing to the ground with ice spikes forming around him.

She sent another flamethrower spell at him while he was down, but he was able to react fast enough to roll over and counter it with his ice breath. Sunset’s horn sparked brighter and her face contorted in concentration as Frosty pushed himself to his feet, her flamethrower doubling in brightness. The icy being’s eyes widened, and he stopped trying to fight her spell. Rather, he dove out of the way as a stream of fire passed straight through his former position. As he forced himself back up, Sunset glanced at how the others were doing.

The Jukid was knocked out, Kirby dusting off the ends of his arms. Bandee looked to be winning his baseball match of doom, with every bomb the Poppy Bros threw being knocked off the side of the ship as he advanced. Eventually, he got close enough that he hit the bomb right back at its thrower, sending his adversary straight back through the door they came from.

Sunset’s attention soon snapped back to Frosty as he got back up, but he didn’t attack her.

Instead, he simply stared up in shock as Twilight unleashed the magic she had been gathering. The laser she fired was at least a meter in diameter and such a bright violet it hurt to look at. Despite the Halberd’s apparently magic-resistant steel plating, the sheer power behind the attack punched clean through the wing’s support structure and continued out into the sky.

Kirby took advantage of Frosty’s distraction while it was going on and punched him straight through the wall and back into the ship.

With an unholy screeching sound that forced everyone awake to cover their ears, the damaged wing began to bend where Twilight had struck it. As they stared upward, the force of the wind caught the high surface area of the bending wing. An incredibly loud sound echoed out as the metal tore along the sudden stress line and the wing broke in half, the detached portion falling towards the ocean.

The entire Halberd shuddered and began to list to the left as the lift force on that side of the ship vanished. Sunset applied a sticking charm to her hooves and grabbed hold of Bandee before either could fall off as the banking hit an extreme. Kirby, thankfully, seemed like he could float by himself, and Twilight had grabbed the unconscious Jukid in her telekinesis.

“Major damage to the left wing!” Axe Knight shouted over the PA.

There was a crashing sound as something moved around on the bridge. “We’re losing balance!” Mace Knight pointed out.

“Redirect power to the anti-gravity engines and lower the starboard wing,” Meta Knight commanded, calm as ever. “We need to rebalance the ship.”

“It’ll take a bit of time, but it’ll work,” Sailor Dee added.

Sunset reached the door, which had closed when gravity forced it to do so, with the ship at a 45-degree angle and Bandee clinging on to her mane for dear life. She fiddled with it for a bit. “Shit! Something’s blocking the door!” She tried one last time to open it, with no avail. “Why the hell doesn’t this open outward? Isn’t that a fire safety violation of some sort?”

“I don’t think there’s really anything flammable on this ship!” Bandee shouted over the wind.

A shout from Kirby diverted everyone’s attention to him. He was floating back into the ship through the hole he’d punched Frosty through.

Glancing at each other, the other three followed.

It seemed that Kirby had punched Frosty into an air duct. They passed his sleeping body shortly into their ascent up the now-tilted passageway, and Twilight deposited the Jukid next to him. It was a tight fit, both for the two Meta-Knights and for the group trying to sneak through. Twilight and Sunset both had to uncomfortably crouch as they moved, and Bandee and Kirby were slower because of the duct's tilt forcing them to climb.

Soon, they came across a strange electrified block, and Twilight had to wonder why it existed. Well, other than to discourage people from trying to sneak around in air vents, she supposed. As the group cleared it (something that the Halberd’s tilt actually made a bit easier), they could hear the muffled messages from the bridge through the walls.

“They’re in the ducts!” Axe Knight noted.

“What are they trying to do in there?” Vul asked.

“Are they lost?” Sailor pondered.

“Hold on a moment,” Vul said with a chuckle. “I have an idea for when they get closer to the wing.”

With that ominous statement, it clicked off.

The group continued on in silence, giving Twilight a moment to actually process everything that had been going on. In the last half an hour or so, she’d barely survived distracting the most heavily fortified battleship she’d ever seen. She had broken into said battleship with the help of a giant bird, a pink puffball of mass destruction, an attempted thief, and a guy with a spear. And then she’d ripped off one of its wings. Frankly, this was mostly blurring together for her. But if conflict in this world was as common as Dedede made it seem, she would likely have to get used to it.

Eventually, after carefully avoiding a few more electrified areas, Kirby kicked open one of the vents. Said vent seemed to be in an elevator shaft, so Kirby floated down to the nearest door with Twilight following, the others in her telekinesis. She forced the doors open with her magic, and thankfully there was another map nearby that they flocked to.

Twilight tilted her head so that her line of sight matched the tilt of the ship. “Alright, so it looks like the starboard wing is that way,” she pointed down the hall. “After we take it out, we can backtrack through here and go down to the reactor.”

The group climbed forward, going through the hallways in eerie silence. “Where is everyone?” Bandee asked.

“I think we already took out pretty much all of the crew,” Sunset pointed out as they passed through a mess hall. The tables had all fallen out of place, piled up against the now lower wall. Soon enough though, they reached the exterior door to the starboard wing, but everyone jumped when the bridge patched back through.

“RELEASE THE HEAVY LOBSTER!” Vul shouted.

“WHAT?” Sailor Dee, Axe Knight, and Mace Knight shouted back.

“No!” Meta Knight vetoed. “The Lobster can’t be used when the ship is listing like this!”

Vul grumbled about it, but he relented, much to Twilight’s relief. She wasn’t sure what this Heavy Lobster was, but it sounded intimidating. As they entered the platform under the wing, the bridge kept discussing what to do.

“If we can’t use the Lobster yet, what do you suggest, Sir?” Vul asked.

Meta Knight hummed for a moment as Twilight gathered power. “Axe Knight, direct all starboard cannons to fire under the wing.”

Twilight’s eyes widened. She canceled her laser and quickly erected the most powerful shield she could around the group. A cacophonous roar, overpowering that of the wind, sounded as the Halberd opened fire. Her shield held, fortunately, but the ground they were standing on started to worryingly warp.

Bandee was cringing, his arms over his ears. Sunset wasn’t much better, though she did have her own horn lit with a second shield inside of Twilight’s in case hers broke. Kirby, though, had a determined glint in his eye. He, much to Twilight’s horror, slammed through the shields from the inside (which quickly reformed) and began sprinting up the side of the ship.

The Halberd’s considerable defenses quickly trained on him, of course, but the little puffball was surprisingly agile. Reaching the joint where the wing met the rest of the hull with little to no issue, he drew back his arm and punched the wing. The metal around the hit notably deformed, but it wasn’t enough to rend it from the hull. The Halberd’s own weapons, though, were more than enough to finish the job. As Kirby slid back under the shield, the massive metal structure tore itself apart and collapsed.

Unfortunately, with the angle the ship was at, the wing didn’t just fall right down to the water below. It instead impacted the massive platform underneath it which, having already taken damage from the sustained artillery barrage, separated from the main body of the ship as well. Twilight and the others were suddenly forced to improvise as their floor disappeared.

The lift on either side of the ship equalized, the Halberd began to stabilize. Had they been inside, that would have been a good thing, but as it was the sloped side of the ship they were using to stand on was now quickly becoming vertical. They dropped the shields and started running, continually being forced further and further down the hull by gravity. “There!” Bandee shouted, pointing with his spear. “A service door!”

Twilight yanked it open in her magic as Bandee and Sunset dove for it, successfully getting back inside the Halberd. Kirby and Twilight followed soon after, entering and slamming the door behind them as the ship finally returned to being upright. The group sat there panting for a moment. That was far too close.

“What…” Sunset took a breath, “what now?”

Bandee got up and pointed his spear forward. “Well, there’s only one way to go. We still need to take down the reactor so the anti-gravity stops.”

With a series of nods, the group started down the hallway as they listened to the bridge descend into chaos again.

“THE RIGHT WING IS GONE!” Sailor Dee shouted.

“At least we’re rebalanced,” Vul tried.

“Where are they now?” Axe Knight asked.

“It looks like they’re headed towards the reactor!” Mace Knight answered. There was a pause as Kirby seemed to smell something and made a beeline for a side door. Mace Knight seemed to start panicking. “Wait a second, don’t go in there!”

Inside was a crate full of what looked like tomatoes with the letter M on them. Twilight blinked. “What?”

Kirby happily picked one up and shoved it in his mouth before tossing another three to his companions. Shrugging, Twilight tried it. She blinked in surprise as her wings stopped aching. Right, food heals here. She still needed to get used to that.

“They found my secret tomato stash!” Mace Knight wailed as the group exited the room and continued towards the reactor.

“You were hoarding Maxim Tomatoes and didn’t tell us?” Axe Knight asked in disbelief.

“Sir, it looks like they’ve made it to the reactor!” Sailor exclaimed.

Sure enough, the group had entered a massive, blueish room with three strange pedestals in it. All three had a glowing octahedron floating above them, with columns above those reaching to the ceiling. Surrounding the reactor cores were shimmering force fields, presumably to protect them. And in the background…

Twilight looked around angrily. “Wheelies? You have slaves?” she shouted.

“Of course not!” Meta Knight defensively responded, seeming to lose his cool for just one moment. “The Wheelies are compensated generously for their work!”

“Sir, we need to defend the reactor!” Vul stated. “May I?”

Meta Knight took a moment to respond. “Go ahead, Captain.”

Vul cackled, and Twilight could hear the grin on his face. “Prepare to meet your doom, you four!”

A series of clanking sounds alerted them to something else entering the room, and they whirled around. A massive golden robot crustacean bore down on them, its claws revving up what Twilight assumed would be flamethrowers. Its green eyes were cold and lifeless, simply built to calculate the most efficient way to eliminate all in its path.

“This is the Heavy Lobster! It comes equipped with every weapon in the book! Its armor is completely magic-resistant, heat-resistant, and made of some of the strongest stuff in the universe! Over two tons of pure asskicking power!” Vul gloated. “Good luck!”

The Lobster moved, and the battle began.

Twilight immediately took to the air, but the Lobster moved far faster than she had expected. It sent a jet of flame her way, forcing her onto the defensive as she raised a shield. Sunset had managed to fare slightly better, opting to try and counter the Lobster’s flame with ice spells. Twilight could see that she was running on fumes, though, having spent nearly the last hour constantly using magic. It seemed that these Maxim Tomatoes didn't heal mana burn. Kirby ran up and punched the thing, which did seem to stagger it slightly, but he had to swiftly dodge the Lobster’s counterattack.

The claw it was using to fire at Twilight finally stopped, allowing her to drop her shield. Unfortunately, though, it was just switching to a new attack. The Heavy Lobster jumped nearly to the ceiling of the room before slamming down, coming close to stomping on Bandana Dee. The general did manage to avoid it, rolling out of the way, but wasn’t able to actually hit the thing.

Twilight charged up a magical laser and fired, which just bounced off the Lobster’s armor and drilled a smoking hole in the floor. It responded by opening its claw and sending a barrage of miniature missiles her way, which were thankfully easy enough to shoot down. It tried shooting fire at her again, but it seemed Sunset put a stop to that soon enough with a cryokinetic spell of some sort.

“Kirby punching it seemed to do something!” Twilight shouted. “Maybe he can do that more!”

He didn’t get the chance just yet, though, as the Lobster targeted Bandana Dee once again. It shot out a glob of something that looked like paint, for some reason, which he easily swatted away with his spear.

“Why does it still have that attack?” Vul shouted. “We added that in as a joke!”

“S…sorry, Sir!” Axe Knight stammered. “I must’ve forgotten to take it out.”

Vul raged over the sound system, but the battle continued with the Lobster activating some jets behind it and trying to ram Bandee at full speed. The spearman, not being able to dodge to the side quick enough, planted his spear on the ground and vaulted over the robot, accidentally flicking leftover paint into its eyes in the process. It whirled around as soon as it missed, opening its claw and firing some missiles. Instead of targeting any of the group, however, they hit the base of the middle reactor.

“Target its eyes!” Bandee shouted. “Maybe we can get it to destroy the reactor!”

Unfortunately, the paint was still dripping, and the Lobster’s vision cleared in only moments. Now, though, they had a plan. Sunset cast a spell directing a cloud of smoke to settle around the Lobster’s eyes, and Kirby rushed in. He punched one of its legs, forcing it back a bit, but a claw moved to target him despite the cloud of smoke. Twilight frowned. Perhaps it had ways other than vision to determine where a target was?

She sent another laser its way. It wouldn’t physically harm it, and like its predecessor it was just deflected through the floor, but if she was right about it detecting pressure…yes! Combined with the smoke, it seemed to disorient the Lobster for a moment, letting Kirby get another few strikes in.

Bandee swung his spear, flicking more of the remnants of paint onto the golden robot. Just as they expected, its next shot–this time a flamethrower–went wide. Instead of hitting any of them, it once again blasted into the middle reactor, damaging it even further.

The force field began to flicker.

“Just a bit more!” Twilight called out.

With one last punch, Kirby retreated back to where Sunset and Bandee were waiting as the smoke and paint cleared. The robot was now between those three and the reactor, with Twilight hovering above it. The Lobster staggered–actually staggered, Kirby must have hit something important–forward and charged up another attack, but it didn’t get the chance to use it.

Sunset grinned and sent a mote of light under the Lobster, and Twilight’s eyes widened as she recognized the spell. That was Naught Bell’s Explosion, the strongest explosion spell that didn’t require an absurd prep time! The Lobster would still probably be able to take it, but it looked like that wasn’t what Sunset was aiming for.

The much abused floor was what gave way from the ensuing blast. A hole was rent open in the hull, and the middle reactor seemed to take critical damage from the spell as well. All two tons of Heavy Lobster lived up to its name as its footing suddenly vanished, and it plummeted into the water below.

However, with how much fire had been thrown around during the fight, the pressure in the reactor room had increased by quite a bit. Enough that the pressure difference between it and the outside air caused noticeable suction. And since Twilight was flying, it left her especially vulnerable to shifts in air currents.

The sudden downdraft caught her off guard, and before she knew it, she was tumbling out of the Halberd, ejected from its keel. She regained her balance quickly enough, but before she shot back into the reactor room, a thought crossed her mind. The whole ship was about to come down, but how many unconscious bodies were on it? She looked down at the ocean. How many would drown?

She gathered up her pegasus magic, shot around to the bow of the ship, and started scanning the deck. Luckily, the Halberd’s main deck was equipped with guard rails, so it didn’t look like any of the crew had fallen off when the ship was listing. Still, that was a lot of bodies to gather up and bring to shore, and she knew there were more inside.

I’ll be back for you three, she thought, and I know they tried to kill us, but I couldn’t live with myself if I let all these people die!

She shot towards the deck, beginning her impromptu search and rescue.

“TWILIGHT!” the three remaining in the reactor room, even Kirby, shouted at the hole in the floor, but she was well out of earshot by this point. Sunset looked at the pink ball oddly. Was that the first time she’d heard him speak?

“She was our ride out of here!” Bandee exclaimed over the rushing air. “What do we do now?”

Sunset looked at the reactor. The force field had gone down, leaving the core exposed to any sort of potential attack. For the first time in well over a decade, Sunset felt an actual feeling of heroic spirit well up within her, but she squashed down that thought. Surely staying on Kirby’s good side was the right play here, it was just practical! She was still going to eventually return to Equestria and overthrow Celestia, since that was the whole reason she was in this mess in the first place!

She wasn’t going to make this call just because it felt good to be good, that would be madness!

…Right?

Right.

Her internal struggle solved for the time being, she nodded at Bandee. “We’ll destroy the reactor and get to the bridge. They definitely have an emergency way out of here.”

Bandee looked at her expectantly. “Are you gonna shoot it?”

Sunset shook her head. “That explosion took a lot out of me, so I don’t think I can manage something to actually destroy it, and Kirby still is stuck on melee attacks or something,” she explained, gesturing to the headband Kirby still wore. She smiled at the Waddle Dee. “You’re the one with a ranged attack.”

Bandee stared over the hole separating them from the reactor and exhaled. He steeled himself, drew his arm back, and hurled his weapon.

It was a perfect shot. The spear pierced directly into the octahedral core, and for a second, nothing happened. Sunset still used a bit of her remaining mana to erect a shield, though. Just in case.

It turned out to be justified when the core exploded.

The world went white.

Author's Note

Make sure you keep your seatbelts buckled, folks! The Halberd's coming in for a rough landing!

Oh Sunset, you can deny it all you want, but you're one of the good guys now! You just don't know it yet. And Twilight's still on her "save everyone" mindset, even at detriment to herself, but I'm sure Meta Knight will appreciate her saving his crew!

Also, I know that the Beam Attack meme is probably dead at this point, but I still find it hilarious. And I saw an opportunity for both it and a cringe compilation joke there, which was just too good to pass up.

Next up, we still have the final boss of Revenge of Meta Knight to get to: the man himself! Stay tuned for chapter seven: Friends Under the Setting Sun!

Chapter VII: Friends Under the Setting Sun

The bridge was in utter chaos. Axe and Mace Knight were running around frantically, desperately looking for some sign that the situation was salvageable. Captain Vul was despondent, staring down at the metrics his console was telling him in disbelief. Sailor Waddle Dee was hyperventilating.

“Reactors Two and Three have been destroyed and Reactor One is failing!” she shouted. “Engines Three and Five are offline!”

“The Wheelies are abandoning ship!” Mace Knight added.

Meta Knight sighed and looked out at the setting sun. “Sailor, can we make sure we go down in the water?”

Sailor Dee checked the map. “It looks like it, yes. At our current trajectory, we’ll probably crash in Secret Sea.”

“We’re chewing through our backup power!” Vul warned. “I give us six minutes before we hit the water, tops.”

“Kirby, Bandana, and Sunset are approaching the bridge!” Axe Knight suddenly shouted, pointing at the central elevator’s camera.

“What about the purple one?” Vul asked, a glimmer of hope in his voice. “Did the Lobster at least take her out?”

Mace Knight shook his head as he flicked through the exterior cameras. “Looks like she’s outside. Whatever explosion took out our reactor cameras must’ve breached the hull.”

Vul sighed angrily as Meta Knight looked at his officers. Really, the five of them were all that was left of his once mighty crew. Everyone else had been knocked out of the fray by the absurdly powerful boarding party. Perhaps, he thought, his attempted coup d’état had been misguided. If Dreamland was capable of taking down his mighty ship with only a party of four, Popstar may have been in good enough hands already.

Still, there was one thing left to do before he could be sure of it.

He spread his wings and flew from the window back to the bridge’s door. “I will stall them for as long as possible. The rest of you should evacuate.”

“No way!” Axe Knight shouted as he and Mace Knight rushed to Meta’s side.

“We’re staying to fight!” Mace Knight added.

Sailor Dee looked at them, her voice shaky, but determined. “Someone’s gotta stay here and make sure we go down in the right spot.” Her eyes glistened. “I’m with you to the end of the line, Sir.”

The other officers turned to stare at Vul. He glared back. “With all due respect, y’all are crazy.” He nodded at Meta Knight. “Even you, Sir. The ship’s going down and everything we’ve worked towards is shot. You know we can’t win this.”

Meta Knight nodded. “Of course.” He looked at each officer individually. “I will not fault any of you for retreating.”

“Good, because I’m out of here!” Vul exclaimed. He rushed over to the bridge’s built-in emergency escape vehicles. “Good luck, everyone! I hope to see you all alive!”

“Well, I think that’s the most encouragement he’s ever given us,” Sailor Dee noted as Vul’s escape pod launched.

Meta Knight looked at his remaining three subordinates. “This is your final chance to evacuate. Once we step through those doors, there’s no going back.”

Axe and Mace Knight looked at each other and nodded. Before Meta could stop them, they rushed forward and out the door. “We’ll hold them off a bit to give you time to prepare, Sir!”

Meta Knight gave a defeated sigh and walked over to the wall, where he stored his spare swords. He picked one up in his off-hand and swung it around a bit. Yes, this would do nicely for testing Kirby’s skills. Before he left the room, though, he turned back to Sailor Dee.

“There is such a thing as being too loyal,” he reminded her.

Sailor smiled up at him. “Maybe, but you’ve treated us all so well. We’re just trying to return the favor.”

It couldn’t be seen under his mask, but Meta Knight smiled. “Thank you.”

With that, he exited the bridge.

The elevator up to the bridge was eerily silent. Sunset thought the PA system having been turned off added most of that, though. Despite the fact that they had been trying to kill them, the bridge crew’s antics had been pretty amusing. As they neared the top of the elevator ride, she drew in a breath and glanced down at Bandee and Kirby. “Are you two ready for this?”

Both nodded, but Bandee looked decidedly more nervous than Kirby. It made sense, Sunset thought. He was down a weapon and limited to punching things at this point.

She frowned. “Hey, if you want to sit this one out, I won’t blame you.”

Kirby also laid a comforting arm on Bandee’s back.

The general shook his head. “Thanks, but I’m still going to do all I can to help.” The elevator doors opened. “Even if I probably won’t be able to do anything against Meta Knight.”

“If we have our way, you won’t even be getting to the boss!” shouted Axe Knight, and the three stepped out into the hallway to face their adversaries.

Sunset got a good look at the bridge crew for the first time. It was easy to identify who was who just based on what weapons they were wielding, which she thought was a little bit on the nose. It was a bit interesting that Mace Knight had a flail instead of a proper mace, she supposed, but she didn’t let that distract her. These were the upper echelons of the Meta-Knights, so they were almost certainly powerful.

Not nearly powerful enough to stand up to Kirby, though. The ensuing battle, if it could even be called that, was entirely one-sided. Kirby had rushed forward before the two knights even had the time to move, slamming his fist into Mace Knight’s chest. His flail went flying across the room as he was launched bodily into the wall. Axe Knight fared little better as Sunset wrenched his weapon out of his hands with her telekinesis, throwing it away.

Axe Knight chuckled nervously as he backed up. “Uh, never mind that, then.”

He spun on his heel and rushed to the next room, draping the unconscious Mace Knight over his shoulders in the process. Sunset, Bandee, and Kirby pursued them, but stopped short upon entering. They were still able to see the two knights retreat into what Sunset assumed was the bridge out of the corner of their eyes, but most of their attention was on the figure above the next door.

Meta Knight was far smaller than Sunset had expected, barely being larger than Kirby. He seemed to be of the same shape as well, though his long cape made it a bit unclear. His back was turned to them as he stood on the small platform, but it didn’t make the long sword they could see he was holding any less intimidating.

“This is it, you three,” he spoke, not turning around. “You have disabled the Halberd and most of my crew, ending my revolution before it even had the chance to begin. You have displayed insane amounts of power, and have forced me to reconsider my stance on Dedede’s leadership. So this shall be your final test.”

He whirled around, a pair of bat-like wings flaring out from his back as he threw a second sword at them. It seemed he had impeccable aim, as it pierced through the floor directly in front of Kirby. “Prove to me that you can defend Popstar! Take up the sword and face me in battle!”

Kirby discarded his headband and inhaled the weapon, gaining a sword of his own and a little green cap. Sunset could swear that she saw Meta Knight’s yellow eyes glow in response under his silver mask. He crouched and launched forward as quick as a flash.

His and Kirby’s swords met not a second later, the latter barely getting his own up in time with how quickly the knight moved. The two struggled in place for a moment before Meta Knight suddenly accelerated backwards, causing Kirby to stumble as he overextended. The knight tried to capitalize on the vulnerability with a quick slash, but it seemed he had forgotten Kirby’s companions. The strike was slowed midway to his target by one of Sunset’s shields. It was strong enough to shatter it, still, but it bought Kirby enough time to get back to his feet and parry.

Sunset winced and rubbed the base of her horn. With how low on mana she was, it seemed that she’d be relegated to only using low-power shields and telekinesis for the time being. “Bandee!” she called as Meta Knight engaged in a series of quick sword strikes with Kirby. “Get to the bridge and try to see if anything in there might help!”

Bandee gave her a determined nod and started booking it for the door.

Meta Knight tried to turn and prevent the general from advancing, but another one of Sunset’s shields blocked his strike. This time the shield held as she had increased the power she was working with, and it did force the knight to stop pursuing the Waddle Dee. Kirby being able to go on the offensive for once and attacking with a slash of his own gave Bandee even more time, and quickly enough he vanished behind the bridge’s door.

Unfortunately, that meant that Meta Knight now regarded Sunset as a problem.

He took to the air as soon as he got a reprieve from Kirby’s strikes, launching towards Sunset. She shrieked and dropped to the floor, the sword that would have been through her neck instead just catching a segment of her mane. He turned around midair to target her again, and Sunset’s horn sparked as she erected yet another shield.

As Meta Knight bounced off of this one, Sunset considered her options. As things were now, they wouldn’t win. She was stuck just defending, and Kirby could barely ever get close enough to land a hit without Meta being the aggressor. Really, Sunset thought as she idly erected another shield to protect Kirby, they needed to mix up their strategy.

Wait a second. Kirby needed to get closer, that was it! “Hey Kirby!” Sunset shouted, lighting her horn. An aquamarine aura rose around him as he began to float a bit in her telekinesis. He pointed his sword at Meta, who had landed and was looking at them curiously, and Sunset nodded.

With a shout, she launched the puffball right at Meta Knight, whose eyes widened in realization just a slight bit too late. He raised his sword to block Kirby’s swing, but this time Kirby had him on the back foot. The two sword wielders clashed for a moment before Kirby twirled away and disengaged, pulling the same trick Meta had on him earlier on in the fight. The knight tripped forward, and Kirby took full advantage of it. With a metallic clang, his sword slammed into the mask and glanced off.

Meta Knight immediately retreated a bit, taking to the air again with a rush of wind around his wings. For a fleeting moment, Sunset hoped that he had given up, but it seemed that that was not the case. He felt at his mask with his off hand to–she presumed–check for any damage before letting out a low chuckle. “Fools,” he stated simply.

Then he wrapped his cape around himself and teleported.

What the fuck? Sunset thought.

She didn’t have any time to ponder it, though, as she heard the air displace behind her. Panicking, she focused her remaining mana and erected another shield at her back in the nick of time, just barely blocking the knight’s strike. She still winced, however, as she felt the phantom pressure on her horn increase. Hurriedly turning around so she was actually facing Meta Knight, her eyes widened.

Running along the strongest shield she’d raised thus far was a visible crack. Meta Knight slashed again, and a second crack formed. A third slash, and Sunset cried out in pain as she felt the feedback from such a strong shield shattering. Before the knight could close in for an attack, though, a shout from Kirby sounded in Sunset’s ears. She felt something bounce on her back and looked up to see the puffball soar over her head, meeting Meta Knight’s attack head-on.

The two struggled in the air for a moment, but soon enough Meta Knight tried to pull the same trick. His cape flared again as he teleported, this time appearing behind Kirby. His attempted slash was stalled again, though this time not from a shield. Instead, Sunset had grabbed his sword in her telekinesis, preventing him from attacking long enough for Kirby to land.

The knight broke free in only a few seconds, however, and with a flap of his wings was rushing towards Kirby again. The puffball cried out in surprise and raised his sword to block, but was launched backwards by the force of the blow. When Meta Knight turned to Sunset again, though, another shout from Kirby got both of their attentions.

The pink being grinned and threw his sword at them. Meta Knight, confused, batted it away with ease. Sunset, on the other hoof, had figured out what Kirby wanted her to do. As the knight advanced towards Kirby, she picked up the sword in her telekinesis and struck.

Meta realized what was going on only a moment too late to avoid getting hit entirely. He spun around as soon as he noticed the trick, the sword once again hitting and glancing off of his mask. Once more, he flapped his wings and took to the air to check if his mask was damaged. This time, though, Sunset could plainly see that it had been.

A thin crack had begun to form through the center of it, and based on Meta’s eyes widening, he knew it. Sunset grinned. Just a bit more and he’d be vulnerable.

Then her expression fell as he, still in the air, swung his sword and spawned a fucking tornado.

Sunset’s jaw dropped as she dove out of the way. She wasn’t nearly skilled enough in atmokinesis to dispel something like that, especially while she was so low on mana, so dodging was her only option. She cringed as the tornado struck the floor. The creaking sounds it was making were not promising.

“Behold,” he stated, swinging twice. Two more miniature tornadoes formed and moved towards her, and she paled. It looked like he was planning on just taking out the floor if they didn’t end this soon!

As she dodged the first of the two tornadoes, she glanced back at the sword she had in her grip and at Kirby, who was quickly making his way towards them. The ground creaked dangerously again as she ran to the side of the second tornado and devised a plan. “Kirby, catch!” she shouted, picking the puffball up in her telekinesis and launching him and the sword at Meta Knight.

Kirby picked up on what she was planning almost instantly, catching the weapon on his flight towards the knight. Meta tried to counter the strike, but he had been caught up in attempting to toss out another tornado and wasn’t able to block in time. With a mighty shout, Kirby slammed his sword down on Meta Knight’s mask.

The force of the blow launched the knight to the ground, where he slid backwards considerably, even having planted his sword in the floor to slow himself. He still picked himself up and wrenched his weapon out of the floor, ready to continue the fight, when his mask finally shattered. His bright yellow eyes blinked twice as he looked down on himself.

Sunset stared at the unmasked Meta Knight in shock. He looked like a navy blue version of Kirby! Just with wings, defined arms, and hands. It was…unexpected, to say the least. He was frankly pretty cute underneath the mask, and added another being to her list of adorable things to be utterly terrified of.

Meta Knight apparently didn’t like being without his mask, though, as he wrapped his cape around himself and fled at the first opportunity.

Sunset breathed heavily. That definitely could have gone better, but it could have gone worse, as well. She felt like she still had just enough mana to teleport back to shore, so now all that was left was to grab Bandana Dee and leave.

Then the ship pitched forward, the ground let out an ear-splitting screech of metal, and the floor gave way.

When Bandana entered the bridge, he was expecting something to try and stop him. This was the most important part of the ship! Instead, it looked like it had been nearly abandoned. Screens flashed red with warnings, alarms blared, and in the middle of it all was a single Waddle Dee.

“So,” Sailor Waddle Dee said, staring out the massive window, “I see you’ve made your way to the bridge. Here to finish me off?”

Bandee sighed. Alright, new plan. There didn’t seem to be anything here that would help out against Meta Knight, anyway. “I’m not armed, Sailor. I just want to talk.”

“Talk?” Sailor snarled, whirling around to face him. “Like how we ‘talked’ when I told you about my plans?”

Bandee frowned with his eyes. “You told me that you were planning on rebelling against King Dedede. How was I supposed to react?”

“Not by going right to him and blabbing!” she shouted. “You went and got yourself promoted, and all I got out of it was being forced onto the run! I thought we were supposed to be friends!”

“We’re supposed to be loyal to the King!” Bandee defended.

“He treats us like slaves!” Sailor countered. “Don’t you see it? We break our backs building for him, serving him, fighting for him, and what do we get out of it? Nothing!”

“He’s learning, Sailor!” Bandee shouted back. “He’s been getting better ever since he lost to Kirby!”

Sailor scoffed. “I’ll believe that when Nruffs fly.” She looked back out the bridge’s massive window. “Sir Meta Knight may be acting to protect Popstar as a whole, but I’m fighting for a personal cause.”

“The Waddle Dees don’t need to be liberated, Sailor! We’re not slaves!” Bandee tried to explain. “The King compensates us for our work and in return we’re happy to serve him!”

“Are you? Really?” Sailor asked, venom in her voice. “Are you really happy to take orders from him as he loafs around and does nothing to prepare against what’s out there?”

“He’s still my boss,” Bandee said, “but if I don’t like an order, I’m allowed to tell him no.” He looked at her, a bit confused. “And what do you mean by ‘what’s out there’?”

Sailor Dee laughed mirthlessly. “You don’t know? The universe is a big place, Bandana. Dedede’s too focused on what local threats there might be to his rule. But Sir Meta Knight knows about what may attack us from beyond the stars.”

Bandee narrowed his eyes. “That doesn’t justify,” he gestured broadly at everything around them, “all of this! You can go about something like that peacefully! Your problem with King Dedede could have been solved like that, too! Did anyone in your crew think to just talk to him?”

“What do you think Meta Knight did as soon as Dedede took power?” Sailor asked him. “He tried to explain that Popstar needed proper defenses, but Dedede just told him to get lost!”

“That seems like that description might be a bit biased,” Bandana Dee pointed out. “I don’t think the King would just turn down help like that.” He looked around. “And if this is what Meta Knight resorts to to prove a point, I doubt he did all that well in explaining his intentions the first time around.”

Sailor sighed. “Alright, I’ll admit that my hatred for Dedede might be influencing how I heard Meta Knight recall that.” She stamped her foot. “But that doesn’t excuse you from wrecking all the good we could have done with the Halberd!”

Bandana once again gestured broadly at everything. “You were trying to invade and conquer Dreamland!”

Sailor Dee seemed to not have a response to that, so Bandee decided to take a chance.

“I know you’re angry at King Dedede and I know you’re angry at me–and you have a good reason to be–but he really is getting better. I’m not asking you to come back to the castle and work for him again, but…” he looked right at her, “for what it’s worth, I’m sorry for ratting you out without hearing your reasoning or trying to talk you down, first. Can we be friends again, maybe? Or at least friendly?”

Sailor drew in a sharp breath, as if his extension of an olive branch had stabbed her. Before she could respond, though, a loud beeping sound overtook the entire bridge. Sailor rushed over to one of the consoles. “We’re out of emergency power,” she said. “The anti-gravity engines are shutting down.”

The ship pitched forward, and somewhere a siren started blaring.

Twilight rushed through the hallways as sirens blared around her, a cloud of dozens of unconscious Meta-Knights trailing behind her in her telekinesis. She’d just reached the scene of the hall battle from just before they took out the port wing. Adding all of their bodies was a considerable strain on her magic, but nothing she couldn’t manage.

The ship beginning a nosedive was more than a bit worrying, however. She was running out of time.

If her memory served, though, there were only three more to collect. As she reached the exterior door, she idly added the unconscious Poppy Bros Senior to the cloud. As it turned out, his body had been blocking the door earlier. Twilight frowned at the small door. She needed to get out there, grab the Jukid and Frosty, and get them all to shore, but with the door being fairly small it would take too long to get outside.

Alright, screw it, Twilight thought. The ship’s going down anyway.

She gathered up energy around her horn and fired a hole in the wall, widening the door by around tenfold. She quickly flew outside and glared at the hole Kirby had punched the Mister Frosty through. That would also take her far too much time to traverse and grab the two, so she cut the knot. The light around her horn brightened more and more as she gripped the hull in her telekinesis, until with a mighty shout she tore the metal apart. The air duct was completely demolished, but the two’s bodies were free and she could grab them.

Twilight grimaced as she picked them up. Right, the Halberd was magic-resistant; that took a lot more out of her than it should’ve. She looked at the cloud of Meta-Knights around her and grimaced. She hadn’t felt mana burn this bad since the ursa minor incident, and she doubted she’d be able to get back in there fast enough to save the rest of the boarding party.

As she looked at the sinking ship, trying to determine how long it would take to reach the water, she noticed a figure launch out of a door in the bottom of the ship. She blinked. Was that Kirby riding a Wheelie?

She saw Meta Knight rush out soon after, but he paused upon noticing her. The two were well over a hundred meters apart and definitely not able to hear each other, but that didn’t seem to matter. Their eyes met, and a silent understanding seemed to pass between them. She saved his crew, so he’d save hers.

He nodded when she gestured back at the Halberd and circled back to the front of the bridge. Twilight, in turn, looked back at the shore and began gathering pegasus magic around her.

She just hoped the others would be alright.

Sunset cried out when she landed. That was at least a few meters down from where they had fought Meta Knight, and it felt like her left forehoof was broken. She still had access to some of her magic, though.

She looked around. Kirby had landed next to her, and one of the Wheelies from the reactor was here for some reason. The puffball was looking at her, worried, but she waved him off. Even if she hissed in pain when she did it.

“If you can, escape with that Wheelie,” she said. Looking back up at the bridge’s doors, she steeled herself. This was the second time today she felt the need to actively do something that most people would consider heroic, and she didn’t have the time to talk herself out of it. “I’ll go back for Bandee!”

Kirby gave her a determined nod and took off, a navy blur speeding after him. Shit, Meta Knight still hadn’t given up, had he?

Sunset shook her head. She didn’t have time to worry about that. Looking up, she cringed. She only had enough mana left for one short-range teleport and a shield spell, so hopefully that would be enough. She charged her horn and teleported up to the bridge.

Inside was pandemonium. Something had fallen when the ship pitched forward, crashing through the window. Sailor Dee was sliding towards the hole when Sunset entered, but before she could do anything, Bandee acted first. He jumped over one of the now defunct consoles and grabbed hold of the other side of it, just barely reaching far enough to nab Sailor Dee’s arm as well.

Sailor seemed genuinely shocked that he’d do that. Sunset wasn’t quite sure why that was the case, but she supposed whatever personal history they had was their deal, not hers.

Unfortunately, when she had teleported in, she accidentally stepped on her injured hoof on instinct. “Shit!” she shouted, tumbling forward as well. She lit her horn and started wincing from the physical pain it was causing her at this point, but still grabbed both Waddle Dees in her telekinesis and built a spherical bubble shield around them. Momentum and gravity dictated that they kept moving, though, and the three bounced through the bridge and smashed right out the window. Now outside and with the ground completely vanishing, Sunset idly looked down.

The Halberd was already starting to enter the ocean, water covering most of its main deck. As their bubble bounced them towards a watery grave, Sunset almost expected her life to flash before her eyes. That was what was supposed to happen during a near-death experience, right? Yet as she looked down at the waves, the only thing that crossed Sunset’s mind was that Bandee had been right. Orange Ocean really did glow orange during sunset.

Before they could hit the water, though, they suddenly stopped moving, and Sunset heard a grunt from below them. When she looked down at their savior, her jaw dropped and she nearly lost concentration on the shield.

His wings flapping furiously and his arms braced against the sphere of aquamarine hard light, a re-masked Meta Knight stood–or Sunset supposed he flew–against their fall.

Sunset was shocked beyond words. He had just been trying to kill her earlier! Hell, it looked like he hadn’t given up trying to kill Kirby, either! Why would he bother to come back for them?

“I can tell you are confused,” he grunted, “but I will explain everything back on the shore.”

As Captain Vul watched the wreck of the Halberd enter Secret Sea, he very nearly began to cry, a mixture of fury and depression threatening to overwhelm him. Meta Knight may have been the ship’s commander, but he had been the one in charge of engineering. He had been the one to design the ship, to import the Heavy Lobster. He growled. The Halberd had been his baby, but he had no one to blame for its sinking beyond his own mismanagement.

Well, and that blasted Kirby and his pals.

A parachute landed next to him, carrying Axe Knight and an unconscious Mace Knight. “You tried to fight?” Vul asked.

“Yep,” Axe Knight answered.

“I take it you lost?”

Axe Knight glared at him. “Yes, but I don’t think you get to talk, considering you jumped ship as soon as it looked bad.”

Vul laughed humorlessly. “Sir Meta Knight was trying to buy us time to escape. I just took advantage of that.” He looked at himself and shrugged. “‘Sides, I’d be pretty useless in a fight anyway.”

Before Axe Knight could respond, another two beings joined them on the outcrop over the water. Kirby had clearly escaped on one of the Wheelies. Pity. He was glaring at them, as if daring them to try something. Vul, valuing his life, didn’t, instead just continuing to stare out at the Halberd’s sinking wreck.

Next to arrive was the purple pony caring most of the crew. Princess Twilight Sparkle, he thought her name was from what he had heard. She was glaring at them as well, though she made sure to deposit the unconscious crew in a safe location before joining them. “Do you have anything to say for yourselves?” she asked.

Vul clicked his beak and pointed out over the water, where Meta Knight was fast approaching with everyone else that had been on the ship. “I’m sure Sir Meta Knight would love to explain everything,” he answered, a bit more of his anger entering his voice than he meant to let on.

Soon enough, the knight arrived next to them, he placed the bubble he was carrying on the ground, and the orange pony let her shield drop. Sunset Shimmer, if Vul was remembering her name right. It seemed that taking on the ship had taken a lot out of her; it looked like she had a massive headache.

“Alright, Meta Knight,” Twilight stated, flaring her wings to their full length. “I want answers. What in Tartarus was this all about?”

“And why’d you go back to rescue Sunset and Bandana?” Axe Knight asked.

“Hey!” Sailor shouted indignantly. “I was with them, too!”

Meta Knight chuckled slightly. “Well, I couldn’t let some of Popstar's best hopes for protection die.”

Twilight almost physically recoiled in confusion. “I…what?”

Before Meta Knight could answer, the underbrush by the trees rustled and drew everyone’s attention. Out of it shot a…Vul blinked. Was that a dragon? Why hadn’t they brought that on board?

“Twilight!” he called, rushing into the pony’s arms. Ah, he was young. That answered that question. “You’re okay!”

Twilight comfortingly rubbed the dragon’s back. “I’m alright, Spike. I’m alright.”

With a much larger amount of rustling and some yelping as he stepped on something, King Dedede emerged from the trees as well. His hammer resting on his shoulder, he glanced between the pile of unconscious soldiers and the sinking wreck. “Guess I missed the party.”

He, Twilight, Spike, and Kirby all glared at Meta Knight. Dedede shifted his hammer and took a fighting stance. The princess lit her horn, though Vul noticed that she winced when she did so. A few green flames licked around the dragon’s mouth, and Kirby seemed just about ready to open his.

We’re doomed, Vul thought.

Meta Knight let out a laugh–a legitimate laugh–and for a moment, Vul was worried that his commander had lost it. His fears were assuaged, though, when it turned out to be one singular laugh before the knight started talking. “It would seem that the problem that spurred my attempted coup has solved itself.” He took to the air, gesturing for the group to follow. “Fighting here will gain us nothing. Please, come back with us to our base. Everything will be much easier to explain there.”

Author's Note

And with that, the main chapters of Revenge of Meta Knight have wrapped up! I hope I did it (and by extension Meta Knight himself) justice; it's one of my favorite parts of the franchise!

Next, we have a breather after RoMK. After three chapters of nonstop action, our heroes need some time to destress and get a ~~exposition~~ lore dump from our favorite edgy sphere. He still needs to actually explain his actions before anyone trusts him, and the Meta-Knights and Dreamland aren't fully allied yet. They better start getting along soon, though.

For a Nightmare is fast approaching in Dreamland.

Chapter VIII: The Meta-Knights Explained

The Sun had fully sunk below the horizon and twilight had set in by the time the group reached the Meta-Knights’ base of operations. King Dedede had initially protested on the grounds that letting them recoup was a terrible idea, but he had been outvoted and dragged along fairly quickly. Sunset and Twilight had both wanted answers and Meta Knight had had his own words to say on the matter.

“Just four of you managed to sink my Halberd in under an hour,” he had explained. “It would be beyond foolish for me to try to antagonize you any further.”

Still, Twilight glared at him as they entered the massive complex on Orange Ocean’s shore. He and his crew had just spent nearly an hour trying to kill her and her…friends? She wasn’t entirely sure Sunset counted yet, she barely knew Bandee, and she knew Kirby even less. As she deposited the unconscious members of the Meta-Knights on stretchers (which she was assured would be taken to the infirmary), she amended her thought.

Meta Knight and his crew had just spent nearly an hour trying to kill her and her allies, so she wasn’t exactly very inclined to trusting him. But with how defeated and downtrodden most of them looked, she was at least willing to hear them out. If even Discord had been able to reform, perhaps the villains of this world would be amenable to the idea as well.

She was still rather peeved with them, but she’d give them a chance. Coming upon a large building, the group of ten entered. Mace Knight had woken up on the way there, and Kirby had left with the Wheelie shortly after they got back to shore, presumably to go home. Twilight couldn’t really blame him; if she wasn’t so determined to get answers she’d have gone back to the castle and slept for a week. She suspected that Sunset was in the same boat.

After a few minutes of Meta Knight leading them through hallways, they reached what looked like a conference room. A long, rectangular mahogany table dominated the room, though counters topped with odd-looking machines lined one of the walls. As his officers began to take some seats at the table, Meta Knight flew over to the machines. “Coffee or tea?” he asked.

Twilight gaped in surprise. She was expecting a veiled threat or some sort of biting resentment, not for him to be legitimately cordial! It was like Meta Knight’s attitude had completely reversed!

It seemed that everyone else was equally as shocked, though his crew recovered the earliest. “Coffee,” Vul said. “Make it black, please.”

“If we have any green tea left, I’ll have some,” Sailor Dee added.

“Ditto,” Mace Knight said.

“Nothing for me,” Axe Knight requested.

Meta Knight nodded and began messing with one of the machines, which Twilight figured was probably a coffee maker of some sort. “Please, take a seat,” he addressed those that were still standing. “Would any of you like anything?”

Twilight forced her mouth closed and started making her way over to the chairs on instinct. Spike, though, apparently wasn’t having it. “How do we know you aren’t gonna poison us or something?”

Meta Knight stopped what he was doing to look at the young dragon. “You are surprisingly vigilant,” he commented.

Spike blushed. “I read a lot of stories where the villains are sneaky.”

“Very well,” Meta Knight stated, removing his sword and placing it on the counter. He bowed. “I swear to you on my honor as a knight, I will not harm you or your compatriots while you are under our roof.” He turned to his crew and seemed to stare at Vul in particular. “Neither will my crew.”

Vul grumbled about it but didn’t object, something that Twilight got the feeling he did regularly.

“I’ll take a coffee, heavy on the cream,” Dedede said, taking a seat. He still had his hammer over his shoulder, though, and made sure to shift it threateningly.

“I’ll have some tea, please,” Twilight requested.

“Can I have coffee?” Spike asked.

Meta Knight looked at Twilight.

“He’ll have decaf,” she said.

Spike pouted.

Bandee looked around. “Do you have any fruit juices?”

Meta Knight gestured at one of the doors. “The kitchen is through there. We should have a selection of juice in the fridge, if Sailor hasn’t finished it off yet.”

Sailor blushed. “Hey!”

Bandana’s eyes shined. “Still on your orange juice kick?” He made for the door. “Don’t worry, I’ll be pillaging the apple juice.”

Sunset frowned as he vanished through the door. “You all seem way too trusting considering everything that just went down.”

Meta Knight hummed as he began distributing the drinks that were ready. “Perhaps. But none of us are in fighting form-”

Dedede shifted his hammer again.

“Most of us are not in fighting form,” Meta Knight corrected, “and further sullying relations would be foolhardy. Instead, I simply seek to clear the air.” He turned to Sunset. “Would you like something to drink?”

Sunset shook her head. “No, thank you.”

Twilight couldn’t see it behind his mask, but she got the feeling he raised an eyebrow. Assuming he had them, that is. “Are you certain?” he asked. “It would help with your hoof.”

Sunset blinked. “Right, food heals here. I forgot about that.” She maneuvered her way to a chair and took a seat. “I’ll have a black coffee.”

“I take it food does not heal you in your home universe?” Meta asked.

Twilight’s eyes widened. “You know…?”

“That you three are extradimensional?” he finished. “Yes. We do keep an eye on these things.”

With that, he turned back to the machines and got to work, leaving Twilight to contemplate just how long he had been monitoring them. Soon enough, everyone had their preferred drink in front of them, Bandee had returned with a glass of apple juice, and Meta Knight himself had taken a seat. “So, I am sure you all have several questions regarding my and my crew’s actions today,” he began.

“That’s putting it lightly,” Sunset muttered.

“I’ve got just one, actually,” Dedede said, leaning forward. “I don’t really know anything ‘bout how it all went down, so I just wanna ask: why’d you do it?”

“Well, that would depend on who in the crew you ask,” Meta Knight unhelpfully responded. “Most were out for a cut of personal glory, as was Captain Vul, here.”

The captain remained silent.

“Axe and I will follow Sir Meta Knight to the end,” Mace Knight added.

“I have my reasons,” Sailor Dee said defensively. “Bandana knows them.”

Bandana Dee looked down a bit sadly, and Dedede actually cringed. “If it’s what I think it is, I get that.”

Twilight frowned at the lack of elaboration, but she supposed she’d just have to get the full story from Bandee later. She turned to look at Meta Knight. “So why did you try to invade Dreamland?”

Meta Knight somehow took a sip of his tea without lifting his mask. Frankly, it was somewhat disturbing that he could even do that. “King Dedede has been far too focused on local threats to his rule. Dreamlanders are a rather lazy bunch, which has left this planet inadequately guarded. After Dedede rejected my offer of aid-”

“Hold it right there!” Dedede protested. “You didn’t offer up any aid! You just showed up and said you were claiming land for the Meta-Knights! I couldn’t just let that slide!”

“Had you not instantly reacted by swinging a hammer at me, perhaps I would have had a chance to actually explain myself,” Meta Knight deadpanned. Clearing his throat, he continued. “After Dedede rejected my offer of aid, I decided to take matters into my own hands. The Halberd was meant to force the issue. We would succeed and overthrow Dedede, or Dreamland would produce a warrior capable of defending Popstar. Either way, the planet would be defended.” He paused to look at Twilight, Sunset, and Bandee. “It seems that said warriors would be you three and Kirby. For what it is worth, you have my apologies for attempting to kill you.”

Twilight sighed. This was the second person this week that had tried to kill her and was genuinely apologizing for it. “This is just common here, isn’t it?”

“When a tomato can heal broken bones in mere moments,” Meta Knight pointed out, “we tend to be blasé about injuries.”

Sunset tapped her previously-injured hoof on the table. “He’s got a point.”

“Still,” Twilight said, “we can’t be part of some…planetary defense force.” She gestured at herself, Sunset, and Spike. “We still need to find a way home!”

“‘Sides,” Dedede added, “Why’re you so focused on defending Popstar, anyway? You aren’t even from here!”

Meta Knight’s eyes narrowed. “Popstar and its surrounding system are unusually magical,” he explained. “There are beings out there that would use such power to threaten the universe at large. Take, for example, the Fountains of Dreams.”

“I was meaning to ask about that, actually,” Sunset cut in. “What are those?”

“It’s a magical fountain that wards off nightmares for everyone on Popstar,” Dedede explained before Meta Knight had a chance to. “Though, I thought there was just one.”

“There are eight, as far as I am aware,” Meta Knight said. “Those on other planets serve much the same purpose as Popstar’s, but each is also intensely magical. Their waters provide a much more potent healing quality than this universe’s food, and working with it can imbue objects with magic-resistant qualities.”

Vul grinned. “Tempering the Halberd’s steel with Fountain water was my idea.”

Twilight frowned. “While I can understand why having political control over the Fountains would be beneficial, I can’t exactly see how a villain would use healing powers like that to destroy the universe.”

Meta Knight took another sip of tea. “The problem lies with the Fountains’ power sources: the Star Rods. While their true power can only be wielded by a few, one needs not wield a Star Rod to access its power. If my great-great-great grandmother’s notes were correct, each is also capable of producing a summoning star. If all eight were combined…” he shuddered. “She never discovered what being it might summon, only that its power would be limitless.”

“Hold on one moment,” Dedede interrupted. “How do you know all this? I grew up here and I didn’t know that!” He looked to the other native Popstar inhabitants. “Did you guys know this?”

Bandee, Sailor, and Axe and Mace Knight all shook their heads. At Vul’s nod, though, Dedede seemed a bit taken aback.

“I first met Sir Meta Knight on Mekkai,” Vul explained. “I asked a lot of the same questions you all are.”

“To answer your question, Dedede,” Meta Knight said, “I am hardly the first of my kind to come to Popstar. My great-great-great grandmother, Luna Knight, was both a warrior and a scholar, and kept meticulous track of her visit. My reasoning for coming here is twofold: first to prevent supreme power from falling into the hands of those that would misuse it, and second to finish my ancestor’s work.”

“You keep talking about people that’d abuse power,” Sunset mentioned, “and I get that argument, but do you have any actual examples of threats?”

“I know of multiple that got so far as to reach Popstar itself, and were sealed here for an indeterminate amount of time,” Meta Knight said. “Part of my goal is to find where they are sealed and eliminate them permanently.”

Dedede actually looked concerned, for once. “Any idea on where those might be?”

“I have narrowed down the location of one, a being my ancestor referred to only as ‘The Nightmare,’ to having been sealed within Popstar’s Fountain of Dreams itself,” Meta answered. “I am trying to discover a way to destroy him, but so far have had no luck. The Star Rod might work, but I am incapable of wielding it and have not found anyone able to do so.”

He looked back at Sunset. “There are other threats, as well. I come from a nomadic colony of Astrals, and we have heard many a sad tale in our travels. Tales of beings that could shroud entire worlds in darkness, corrupting any they may come across. Tales of a staff that can kill with naught but a touch, of crowns bearing nigh-boundless power. We have even heard tell of a corporation that claims entire planets as theirs, strips them dry of their resources, and moves on to the next.” He looked around to make sure that everyone was appropriately horrified. “Should any of these gain access to Popstar’s vast wealth of power, it could spell doom for all of reality.”

Sunset leaned back and whistled. “Yeah, I can get why that would be a problem.”

Twilight frowned. “You having so many cannons on the Halberd makes a disturbing amount of sense, now.”

Meta Knight looked across the table. “Many of you are likely some of the most powerful beings in this half of the galaxy. Will you help, should this system come under attack?”

Twilight frowned, her mind racing. That was…a lot to process. This universe seemed far more dangerous than her own, and that fact served to increase her drive to get home as soon as possible, but it seemed that Meta Knight had a point. The world getting destroyed would rather hinder her search for a way back to Equestria.

And she would be rather upset with herself if she didn’t give it her all to help every creature she could.

“I’ll still be searching for a way home,” she said aloud, “but you can count on me to help.”

Spike opened his mouth, but shut it when he saw Twilight’s glare. She was absolutely not going to let him put his life on the line under any circumstances. His safety was her responsibility right now.

Sunset shrugged. “Eh, I’m in too. The universe getting destroyed helps no one.”

Meta Knight looked at Bandee expectantly. “And you?”

“B…but…” Bandana Dee stammered. “I can’t defend the planet! I’m just a Waddle Dee!”

“A Waddle Dee that stood up to King Dedede,” Spike pointed out.

“I’m his advisor!” Bandee protested. “That’s my job!”

“You seemed pretty confident boarding the Halberd,” Sunset added.

“You figured out what to do against the Heavy Lobster,” Twilight chipped in.

“You saved me when the ship was sinking despite the argument we’d just had,” Sailor Dee said. “I think that counts for something.”

Bandee seemed to shrink in on himself at the praise. “Alright, then,” he said, blushing. “I get it. I’ll help, too.”

Finally, Meta Knight looked at Dedede. “What say you, King Dedede?”

Dedede tapped his chin. “I still don’t really like you or your knights,” he acknowledged, “but this does sound pretty serious…”

Twilight perked up. She might not have known much about politics, and her experience in saving the world was limited to using the Elements, but this seemed like something she could help with. It sounded very much like the beginnings of a friendship problem.

“What about a compromise?” she offered, snapping both Meta Knight’s and Dedede’s attentions to her.

“How do you mean?” Dedede asked.

“Well, you’re pretty concerned about conventional conflicts that Dreamland might be involved in, right?” Twilight confirmed. “What if the Meta-Knights helped to defend Dreamland, and in exchange you would commit to defending all of Popstar if Meta Knight deemed it necessary?”

Dedede hummed in consideration. “That might just work.”

Twilight grinned hopefully at Meta Knight.

He exuded the feeling of raising an eyebrow. “I refuse to work under him,” he said, pointing at Dedede.

His crew all nodded forcefully in agreement.

Twilight’s face fell.

Dedede frowned. “You’re not exactly on the right side of the negotiating table to be making demands,” he pointed out, shifting his hammer.

Bandee nodded, looking at Meta with a steely expression.

Twilight’s ears flattened against her head.

“And you aren’t even qualified to be a leader!” Sailor shouted at Dedede.

Dedede stood. “Well someone had to step up and rule Dreamland!”

Twilight’s right eye twitched.

Vul scoffed. “And you’ve done such a good job of it. Not even a week into your rule and you were already more a threat to your own country than any external force could have been!”

Dedede growled and stepped forward. He raised his hammer, but he suddenly found it ripped out of his hands as a violet glow surrounded it. He watched as it was set down on the counter next to Meta Knight’s sword before turning to the mare that had done it. Despite the hammer having been put down, Twilight’s horn was still glowing, and Dedede seemed to realize just how tired she must have been. She had bags under her eyes, her mane was sticking up in various places, and if looks could kill, her glare would have vaporized him on the spot.

“Sit. Down,” she ordered.

Dedede sat down.

Twilight fluttered up so she was standing on the table. “Alright, I’m only going to say this once, because it’s late, I just helped fight off a freaking battleship, and I have a migraine. Fighting is going to get us absolutely nowhere.” She glared at Dedede. “Dedede, you’ve made some stupid decisions in the past and you’re a fairly ineffectual leader, but you’re getting better.” She glared at Meta Knight. “Meta Knight, responding to the potential of future threats with an attempted coup d’état was a monumentally moronic decision that’s only caused more problems.”

Sunset frowned. “Twilight, I don’t think-”

“Sunset, kindly shut the hay up,” Twilight interrupted. “I’m going somewhere with this.” She looked back at both Meta and Dedede. “Both of you have had problems with each other in the past, but if what Meta Knight says is true, you need to get over it. It is entirely possible for you to reach a mutually beneficial agreement, so here’s how it’s gonna go.” She looked at Meta. “Meta Knight, do you agree that Dreamland should offer up defenses for Popstar and the surrounding planets in the event that it’s necessary?”

Meta Knight nodded. “That is nonnegotiable, yes.”

Twilight looked at Dedede. “King Dedede, do you agree that the Meta-Knights should compensate your kingdom in some way for the attempted invasion?”

“Of course!” Dedede said. “They’ve gotta pay for it!”

Twilight sat back in her chair and clapped her forehooves together. “It’s settled, then! The Meta-Knights will provide military aid to Dreamland if King Dedede requests it, and Dreamland will pitch in to a planetary defense force should the Meta-Knights call for it,” she explained. “Both maintain full autonomy, and this agreement is more akin to an alliance than anything else.”

Most of the table stared at her with wide eyes. All except for Spike, who seemed unsurprised by Twilight’s outburst, and Meta Knight, who seemed to be considering the offer. “That is agreeable,” he eventually said.

Twilight looked at Dedede, hope and a bit of desperation filling her eyes.

The king sighed. “Alright, fine,” he conceded. “I’ll pitch in.”

“Great, glad that’s settled,” Sunset said. “Can we head back to the castle now? My head’s been killing me for the past hour and I feel like I could sleep for a week.”

Spike yawned a bit, himself. “I’m good to stay up.”

Twilight giggled. “No you’re not. It’s past your bedtime.”

Spike pouted, but he didn’t protest when Twilight levitated him onto her back and began making for the door.

“I do hope to see you all again,” Meta Knight said as the group began to disperse. “Hopefully on better terms than we did now.”

Dedede scoffed. “Yeah, like that's ever gonna happen. I'll see you when we need to deal with something.”

Author's Note

With this, Revenge of Meta Knight has been concluded. I hope the lore I inserted here does an adequate job of explaining why Meta Knight knows that Popstar needs to be protected, but doesn't necessarily know about things like Nova.

I'm also sorry about having you all wait a few days only for me to bring out a much shorter chapter than the last few. I usually try to keep my chapters between three and six thousand words, and I know this was on the lower end of that threshold. Unfortunately, figuring out how to best work in exposition like this is difficult at times, and with the school year starting I can't spend my every waking moment writing. When Splatoon 3 comes out in September it'll slow me down even more, just as a fair warning to everyone.

As for next time, the Nightmare grows ever closer, but it hasn't reached here quite yet. We've still got another chapter of ~~filler~~ lore to set it up.

Chapter IX: Acquaintances Made Friends

Discord took another bite out of his soda cup, the Styrofoam making a sound akin to a clown’s nose honking as he did so. This universe was fascinating; it seemed that Sparklebutt had her work cut out for her. Standing up from his recliner and switching off the screen, he stretched and popped far more bones than he actually had.

Tossing his spent cup aside and brushing some popcorn off of himself, he yawned. That action sequence had been exhilarating, and who knew how that meeting would tie in to everything? All those potential threats were just screaming that they were narrative tension. He knew how these things went.

He tapped a claw against his goatee. He probably should tell Fluttershy about this at some point. Bookface is her friend and she should probably know about one of the Elements being in this sort of danger…

Discord shrugged. Eh, she’d find out eventually. Just as soon as she thought to ask about it.

Sunset awoke the next morning with a splitting headache and a groan. Apparently the novelty of being able to do magic again after eight whole years on Earth had made her a bit more reckless than she should have been when it came to mana burn. She probably wouldn’t be able to use magic for nearly a week at this point, and her headache would last days. The last time she’d had mana burn this bad was when she’d gotten into a fight with that newly-promoted Guard captain back in the day, Shining whatshisface. Damn his shields were tough.

At least Dedede had given her her own room after the Halberd incident. It was nice and secluded, and had a window on the west side of the room. No sunrise shining through to force her up, no Twilight there to nag at her to get up and help with her experiments, all was peace. She could totally sink back into the pillow, shut her eyes, and catch a few more hours of sleep…

“Hey hey hey, Sunny Shim! You up?”

Sunset shot awake at the voice. “Marx? What the fuck are you doing in my room?”

Sure enough, the jester was standing in the center of the room, happily bouncing from foot to foot with an unwavering smile, all from atop his signature beach ball. Strangely, he somehow had a tray balanced on his hat, filled with a full breakfast platter. “I heard you weren’t doing so hot, so I brought you some breakfast!”

Sunset wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to that. “Thanks, I guess? I would’ve just gone down to the kitchen and gotten it myself, but…” she shrugged, trailing off.

“Don’t worry about it!” Marx assured. “You probably need to rest, from what I heard!”

Sunset winced as another stab of pain hit her head. “Yeah that’s…pretty accurate. I’ll need to take it easy for a few days.”

Marx didn’t respond, instead just continuing to bounce from foot to foot after Sunset took the tray, his eternal grin still plastered on his face. Perplexed, Sunset quirked an eyebrow at him. “Do you need something?” she asked.

“Well…” Marx began, “I heard about things happening from the castle grapevine–I’m sure you know how that is–but I’m sure there’s all sorts of juicy gossip right from the horse's mouth!”

Sunset rolled her eyes with a chuckle. “Ah, so breakfast is a bribe, then?”

“Maybe a bit,” Marx conceded.

Sunset mused on how to respond as she took a bite of toast. “What has the rumor mill come up with, anyway?”

“Well, I was talking with Whispy Woods earlier,” Marx began, “and he said that he saw something big go down over Orange Ocean last night, so I figured someone at the castle had to know what was going on! I asked around a bit, and I heard from a broom hatter who heard from a waddle doo who heard from a knuckle joe who heard from Bandana Dee that you guys took down a giant battleship owned by the Meta-Knights! So then I thought to myself: ‘Good golly gee, Miss Sunny-Side Up might’ve hurt herself real bad up there!’ So I got you breakfast!” he finished, his grin never wavering. “So, are the rumors right?”

Sunset shrugged. “Sounds like it’s mostly right.” She frowned down at her plate, trying to parse out how to operate a utensil without magic, before deciding to simply forgo using a fork entirely and just dip her toast in her eggs’ yolk. “The Meta-Knights had a flying battleship, we boarded it, and we took it down from the inside.” She shivered. “I wouldn’t want to do it again, though. Fighting Meta Knight once in my life is once more than enough.”

Marx’s eyes bugged out, and his grin ever-so-slightly fell for half a moment. “You fought Meta Knight personally? And lived?”

“Barely,” Sunset admitted. “Plus, if I’m being honest,” for once, she mentally added, “it felt like he wasn’t going all out. I’m not going to complain about that, though. I’ll take mana burn over death any day of the week.”

“Mana burn?” Marx inquired.

Sunset involuntarily winced. “It’s what happens when a unicorn uses magic faster than their body can draw it from the environment. If we exhaust our internal magic stores as well,” she massaged the base of her horn, “we get a nasty headache until we’re able to cast again.”

Marx looked intrigued. “Magic must work pretty differently wherever you’re from! I don’t think I’ve ever heard of mana burn before.”

“Count yourself lucky,” Sunset said. “I can barely think with how bad this headache is, and even though your food heals physical injuries, it doesn’t seem to do anything with how quickly I can replenish my internal mana.” She considered something for a moment. “Though, I wonder if the Fountain of Dreams would help. It does seem pretty magical…”

Marx suddenly perked up. “You’ve been to the Fountain?”

Sunset shook her head, instantly regretted it when it forced her to wince in pain again, and replied. “I haven’t. It was in the plans for the tour, but that got a bit interrupted.”

Marx hummed in thought. “I could show you it! I’ve been there plenty of times; the Fountain’s great!”

“I’d appreciate it,” Sunset said, “but I don’t think I’ll be up to making a trip like that for at least a few days.”

“Okay!” Marx replied, chipper as ever. “The offer’ll still stand when you’re feeling up to it.” He didn’t exactly frown in concentration–that grin of his was still as weirdly unwavering as ever–but he seemed to give off the vibe of doing so. “Hey, in the meantime, how about I help you out a bit?”

“I wasn’t exactly planning on doing anything difficult until I recover,” Sunset answered a bit confusedly.

“Oh, I didn’t mean anything like that,” Marx clarified. “I was just thinking on how to help you feel better. And you know what always cheers me up?”

Sunset raised her eyebrow again. “I don’t, actually, given that I’ve known you for under a week.”

“Ooh, good point,” Marx responded. “The short answer is that I’ve always found a good laugh to get me to feel better the fastest! And what better way to get a laugh than some good old-fashioned practical jokes?”

“You think pranking people will help with a headache?”

Marx chuckled. “Oh of course not. But it’ll definitely help take your mind off it! And y’know, I could use your help in planning my biggest prank yet!” He glanced at the door, as if to check and make sure no one was listening in. Leaning a bit closer to Sunset, he continued at a lower voice. “You see, in all my years of pranking Dreamlanders, there’s always been one person I’ve never been able to get with a gaffe: Bandana Dee. He always thinks I’m up to something, so I can’t ever prank him! But if you help me out…”

Sunset blinked. Marx’s request was relatively simple, rather foalish, and brought out a playfulness she hadn’t taken to participating in in over a decade. So of course, she grinned. “Why the hell not?”

Marx grinned right back. “Great! Planning session tomorrow at noon at the foot of Mount Dedede! Be there or be square!”

With that, he bounced right out of the room, leaving Sunset alone with her food and her thoughts. Flopping back to her bed (fully intending to get some more sleep), she considered her agreement. It was definitely the right play. She needed some stress relief, after all–she couldn’t very well take over Equestria if she was so stressed she had an anxiety attack halfway through!

Yep, that was definitely still her motive, and that little voice in the back of her head telling her that it was alright to do fun things for the sake of them being fun was completely wrong and not at all overtaking her thought process, no siree!

“So, I was thinking we could hit Bandee with the ol’ one-two punch,” Marx said, leading Sunset through the underbrush at Mount Dedede’s trailhead. “You’ll distract him while I set up the prank!”

“I really don’t think that’s what one-two punch means,” Sunset replied, glancing around. “Where are we going, anyway?”

“Oh, just someplace I keep my notes on Castle Dedede!” Marx chirped.

Sunset blinked. “Notes?”

“Yep!” Marx happily answered. “I keep comprehensive data on everyone in the castle! Likes, dislikes, regular routines, stuff like that. It makes pranking that much easier!”

Sunset furrowed her brow a bit at that, but decided to let it slide as the pair broke out of the shrubbery and entered a clearing. It was relatively small, maybe only a ten-square-meter or so break in the undergrowth, but clearly well-used. A small tent was pitched in one corner, and a well-maintained fireplace was sitting across from it. A set of logs around it seemed to serve as seats, while off to the side there was a cooking set and a cooler.

“There should be some snacks in the cooler, if you’re feeling hungry,” Marx said as he hopped into the tent.

As Sunset moved to inspect the cooler, she swiveled her ears to listen in on Marx’s rummaging around in the tent. Given its size, there was far less of it than she had expected–it didn’t sound like he had much in the way of material things. Opening the cooler seemed to corroborate that hypothesis; there was only half a loaf of bread, a few cold cuts, some cheese, a smattering of other sandwich toppings, and a couple cans of what looked like a soda of some kind.

“Sorry if I don’t really have many vegetarian options,” Marx called as he exited the tent, a manilla folder on his head. “I keep forgetting that I need to restock.”

Sunset shrugged. “Eh, I spent the last eight years in an omnivorous body. I’m used to meat being an option.”

That actually seemed to give Marx pause for once. “You’ve shapeshifted before?”

Sunset waved a hoof. “Sort of. It involved magic mirrors and universe-hopping, but yeah, I spent almost a decade in a completely different form.”

Marx whistled. “That must’ve been an experience and a half.”

“It definitely was,” Sunset agreed. She glanced around again. “Hey, I’m sorry if this seems rude, but I feel kind of obligated to ask: do you uh…live here?”

“Yep!” Marx happily answered, seeming all too chipper for someone admitting their own homelessness.

Sunset blinked. “And you’re alright with that?”

“Yep again!” Marx once again cheerily affirmed. “It’s not that bad a gig, honestly! Whenever I get low on supplies I can just ask around for things, and it means I don’t have to worry about all that much!” He blinked at Sunset, seeming a bit bewildered at her confusion. “What’s got you so perplexed?”

Sunset blinked again and shook her head to clear it. “Sorry. It’s just a bit of a shock to hear someone be so at ease with that. I was homeless, myself, for a while, and it’s not really an experience I want to repeat.”

Marx set the folder down, bouncing up to one of the logs and taking a seat. “Alright, at this point I have to hear this story. Did you end up homeless in another universe, or something?”

“Pretty much,” Sunset admitted. She tapped her chin and took a seat, considering where to start. “Back in Equestria–that’s where I’m originally from,” she added at Marx’s confused expression, “I was the personal protégé of Princess Celestia, the reigning monarch at the time. Which sounds great, right?”

At Marx’s nod, her eye twitched. “Wrong. She was so goddamn stifling. It was all ‘No Sunset, the Restricted Section is restricted for a reason.’ and ‘No Sunset, a filly your age shouldn’t be learning combat magic.’” She scoffed. “I was seventeen when she said that. Given that the Royal Guard starts recruiting at eighteen, I felt like I was completely justified in wanting to learn combat magic.” Sunset rolled her eyes. “But no, it’s like she thought she was my mother or something. It came to a head when she barred me from learning blood magic when I was nineteen. Some…” she cringed, “pretty nasty words were exchanged, so I packed my things and fled through a magic mirror that opened for three days every thirty months.”

“So you fled to another universe because you weren’t allowed to learn something?” Marx asked.

Sunset blushed a bit. “Well when you put it like that it seems petty. There were some other things too; I’m pretty sure Celestia was planning on using me as some sort of political bargaining tool on top of everything else.” She cleared her throat. “But anyway, that left me stranded on the streets of another universe in a foreign body. I had to learn to adapt pretty damn quickly.” Her eyes softened a bit. “So uh…I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you ever need some help, feel free to ask. I know what it’s like in a similar position.”

“Gee willikers, Shim Sham!” Marx exclaimed. “Thanks! I probably won’t really need the help, but it’s good to know someone cares!”

Sunset smiled warmly, once again forcing down that good feeling that comes with selflessness. This was tactical, she assured herself. “No problem!”

The pair fell into comfortable conversation over the next few hours, though they never did wind up discussing how to prank Bandana Dee. Not that Sunset ever noticed that. Nor did she notice that the folder Marx had procured earlier was not Bandee’s, and if Marx had his way, she would never notice whose it was, or what he added to it.

Sunset Shimmer

Likely distrust of authority
Soft spot for the homeless
Easy to fish information out of–just get her talking about herself!
Power: very high

A few days later, Sunset yawned as she and Marx trekked northward. Her headache had subsided to the point that she was comfortable moving around again, finally, though she wasn’t quite sure why Marx had insisted on reaching the Fountain so late in the day. It was a several hour’s hike just to get to Rainbow Resort in the first place, so by the time they got there there’d be very little daylight left.

Of course, when they arrived, she understood the reasoning quite well.

Much like Orange Ocean, it seemed that Rainbow Resort was also best experienced during the sunset, but in a far different way. Where Orange Ocean simply glowed, Rainbow Resort positively shined. Massive icebergs, dozens of meters high, decorated the frozen seaside. The reddish-orange glow of the sunset was bent through these ice spikes, illuminating the entire resort in a soft orange of a similar shade to Sunset’s own coat. The main draw, though, was the centerpiece of the entire thing: what could only be the Fountain of Dreams.

The Fountain, physically, was beautiful. Its main section was an intricately designed bowl, decorated with a multitude of star-shaped emblems. Water poured from this bowl directly into the sea, seemingly generated by the Fountain itself. The bowl’s center held another protrusion, this a blue and white sphere with another bright yellow star on it. On top of that, though, was the Fountain’s shining jewel: a red and white bar with another, even brighter, enough so that Sunset thought it was even glowing, yellow star on it.

That, however, was all secondary compared to the magical effects Sunset was feeling. The Fountain was magically powerful enough that it exuded its own magical field that Sunset could detect, much like the Element of Magic. The few lingering effects from her earlier mana burn resolved themselves in mere moments, her headache clearing almost instantly. Unlike the Element’s magical field, which simply felt like pressure on the base of her horn, the Fountain’s felt like a gentle embrace, as if soothing away her aches and pains.

“Whoa,” Sunset breathed.

Marx grinned. “Pretty cool, right!” He bounced closer to the Fountain. “The Star Rod’s the main attraction, I think.”

Sunset walked up to get a closer look. “The thing at the top?”

“Yeah!” Marx affirmed. “Legend has it, if the right person approaches the Star Rod in a time of need, it can summon the Galactic Nova, capable of granting any wish.”

Sunset stopped short. That sounded almost exactly like Meta Knight’s story, but that being of unfathomable power… “Any wish?” she clarified.

“Any wish,” Marx confirmed. “But that’s probably just a silly legend, anyway. Besides, the real action starts once the sun sets.” He looked up at the sky. “Like right now!”

Sunset joined him in his stargazing, watching mesmerized as Popstar’s aurora borealis spread across the sky, illuminating Rainbow Resort not in the warm tones of the sunset, but rather the cooler colors of blues and violets. The Fountain reflected this, shifting hues to a far softer shade. As Sunset stepped closer to the Fountain, entranced by the beauty of it, she noticed that the Star Rod didn’t just appear to be, but in fact was glowing.

She had no way of knowing that it didn’t usually do that, just as she had no way of knowing about two incredibly close threats. One was just behind her, ready to note the Star Rod’s response to her presence as an addition to her file. The other, much more immediate threat, was in front of her, hidden within the Fountain’s waters itself.

His seal had been steadily weakening over the past centuries as he constantly chipped away at that Astral’s pitiful attempt to keep him contained. Sealing him, a Creature of Dream, on a planet so influenced by its dreams would only work for so long. With the recent chaos and with how weakened he had forced this blasted seal, his corruption could finally begin.

As Sunset and Marx turned to leave, neither noticed the Fountain’s waters darken. First from blue to violet, but soon enough, the water had turned jet black as the Nightmare took hold.

Author's Note

Hey all, ANWAS here. It's been *checks notes* two months? And all I managed to produce was a filler chapter? Shame on me, I suppose. Well, on me, a couple particularly nasty cold viruses, university schoolwork, and my 300 hours on Splatoon 3.
...I might have a bit of a problem.

Regardless, the next chapter shouldn't take nearly as long as this one. I hope. I've nearly completed my gear grinding in Splatoon 3 and most of the hard parts of my classes this semester have wrapped up, so back to Google Docs I shall go!

On to my own thoughts on this chapter: I know it's a bit of filler between RoMK and Adventure, but I definitely feel like it's necessary. Marx in the games never really got enough screen time to make his betrayal feel narratively satisfying. I aim to fix that.

But enough of my machinations on Milky Way Wishes, because next up is Chapter Ten: The Nightmare.

Chapter X: The Nightmare

Twilight found herself in a field of ashes, a flat gray expanse extending from horizon to horizon. The landscape held naught but a single, very dead tree, around which eddies of dust swirled. The wind howled in her ears, carrying with it nothing but a profound emptiness. She had no way of explaining it, but she was sure this was all that remained of her homeland–Equestria had been destroyed in her absence.

She forcefully coughed as the wind pushed some dust her way. “H-hello?” She called out into the void. “Is anypony there?”

“Twilight?” a voice called from behind her. “Is it really you?”

Twilight whirled around, ecstatic at hearing Fluttershy’s voice. Her face instantly fell upon seeing her friend.

Fluttershy was scarily gaunt, appearing as no more than skin and patchy fur draped over a skeleton. Most of the mare’s feathers had fallen out, only a random assortment still attached to bony remnants of wings. Her mane–messier than Twilight had ever seen it–had bleached nearly white. Her eyes looked glazed over, and in lieu of any facial muscles, her mouth was stretched into a permanent grin.

The Fluttershy-like thing stepped forward.

Twilight stepped back.

“I always knew you’d come back,” the zombie of a mare said with a deranged chuckle. “The others stopped believing after a while. But not me. Even when the world ended, I knew it was just a matter of time.”

She said nothing else, simply continuing to advance with an unnatural smile plastered on her muzzle as Twilight hastily retreated. It didn’t last.

Twilight let out a scream as her back hoof failed to connect with solid ground, instead meeting empty air and sending her careening backwards into darkness. She tumbled through the void, desperately trying to open her wings, which stubbornly refused to respond. In fact, Twilight realized to her growing horror, she couldn’t feel her wings at all. Trying to call upon her magic failed as well, as if all her ability had simply ceased to be. Soon, tumbling through this abyss, she lost track of which direction was up.

As she fell, she could hear whispers of a voice that sounded eerily similar to her own. “You could have stopped it,” it claimed. “All they would have needed was your Element, but there you were, stuck in another world.”

“N-no,” Twilight stammered, feebly attempting to reassure herself as she plummeted through the emptiness. “I believe in my friends! Even without me, they could save themselves!”

“Could they? Really?” her own voice sneered back at her. “How soon will Applejack and Rainbow Dash come to blows without your mediating influence? How soon will Fluttershy take to isolating herself again? Face it, Twilight. Your friends will fall apart, Equestria is doomed, and it’s all. Your. FAULT!”

With an “Oomph,” Twilight suddenly landed in a well-lit room. She recognized it immediately: the throne room of Canterlot Palace. It seemed longer than she remembered it, however, and Princess Celestia’s throne at the end was far more imposing, as was the mare herself. Twilight scrambled to her hooves in an attempt to bow, but all she could manage was repeatedly falling flat on her face.

“I have no use for a failure, Miss Sparkle,” Celestia said, with far more bite in her voice than Twilight had ever heard. When she looked up at the Princess, the usually matronly Celestia had been replaced by a mare of fire, a force of untold destruction. “And you have failed in every way possible. Goodbye.”

The room’s temperature spiked as pillars of flame shot up from the floor. The roof fell away, revealing the blisteringly-hot sun, forcing Twilight to collapse and igniting the very air around her.

She woke up screaming.

Twilight’s screams very quickly turned to deep breaths as she took stock of her situation. She was not on fire, nor was she anywhere near Canterlot. She let out a relieved sigh as she laid back down. That was the first nightmare she’d had in a long while, but she supposed she was due for one given the amount of stress she’d been under.

Quiet murmuring from across the room caught her attention and prevented her from simply falling back asleep, though. Glancing at Spike’s bed, her heart fell as she saw the young drake tossing and turning in his sleep. Concerned, she got out of bed and approached his, close enough that she could hear him talking.

“No,” he muttered, “don’t leave me here!”

“Spike,” Twilight whispered, prodding him a bit, “it’s just a nightmare. Wake up.”

Spike simply rolled over again, and now that he was facing her, Twilight could see that he was crying in his sleep. “I-I’m helpful!” he sobbed. “I promise!”

Unable to take any more of seeing her little brother in this state, Twilight lit her horn and cast a wakefulness spell. “Spike!” she called, a bit louder this time. “Wake up!”

Spike shot awake instantly. “I’msosorryIcanstillhelpyoupleasedon’tleaveme-”

Wordlessly, Twilight interrupted his nightmare-induced plea by wrapping him in an embrace, wings and all. Spike returned it in full force, clutching her tightly and sobbing quietly into her chest.

“I’m here, Spike,” she said, rubbing his back. “And I’ll never leave you, alright?”

Spike hiccupped and separated from the hug so he could look her in the eye. “I know,” he said. “That just…felt so real.” He looked down at his sheets and frowned. “I don’t think I’m gonna be able to sleep anymore tonight.”

Twilight reached over and gave him another hug. “Don’t worry. I don’t think I’m getting any more rest tonight either.”

“You had a nightmare too?” Spike asked.

Twilight nodded, though quickly frowned in concentration. “In fact, there might be a correlation! Remember how Dedede said the Fountain of Dreams wards off nightmares?”

Spike gasped. “Something must have happened to it!”

“Maybe,” Twilight allowed, “but we’ll need more evidence.” She levitated the yawning dragon onto her back and made for the door. “Time for some midnight-hour data collection!”

Twilight telekinetically wrenched open the door, and the pair immediately realized that something was very, very wrong. The hall was strewn with confused and half-asleep residents of Castle Dedede, all of whom looked like they’d seen a ghost. Twilight glanced at Spike on her back and frowned. “Alright, something’s definitely up.”

Near the end of the hallway, they could see Sunset exit her own room. Twilight quickly maneuvered around the rather dazed crowd to reach her, and their bleary eyes met. “Nightmare?” Sunset asked.

“Yep,” Spike answered. “Looks like the whole castle had one.”

“And if our hypothesis is right,” Twilight added, “it’s not just the castle that had one.”

Sunset seemed confused for a moment as her sleep-addled brain tried to process the unnecessarily vague statement before recognition dawned on her face. “Oh, you think something’s up with the Fountain?”

“That’s our guess,” Twilight confirmed.

“Hey, uh, guys?” Spike asked. “Didn’t Meta Knight say something about a villain sealed inside the Fountain of Dreams?”

Twilight and Sunset both blanched a bit. “Right. This might be big. Like really big,” Twilight said.

Sunset sighed. “Y’know, I didn’t expect something like this so soon.” She steeled her expression. “But a deal’s a deal. Someone’s gotta step up to the plate and deal with this, right?”

Twilight nodded. “Right.” She glanced around. “I guess the first step is finding Dedede.”

“No need for that,” said a voice from behind them, and Twilight jumped a bit. Whirling around, she relaxed upon seeing Bandee. “Good to know you two are already up. The King’s in his chambers.” He gestured for them to follow, only to immediately run into a broom hatter, who wandered off without a word. Bandee grumbled something under his breath and sighed. “Outta the way, everyone!” he barked. “We have some important business to attend to!”

The hallway-blocking crowd parted instantly, allowing the group unhindered passage. “I think that’s the angriest I’ve seen you so far,” Sunset noted as Bandee led them through the halls at a relatively fast clip.

He slowed enough to place his hand on his face, giving the impression that he’d be pinching the bridge of his nose if he had one. “Sorry. I just woke up and I’m still a bit shaken up at the nightmare I just had.”

“Hey man, don’t worry about it, I just thought it was odd, y’know?” Sunset reassured him. “We’re all a bit on edge right now.” She glanced back at Twilight. “Though I will say, you seem oddly chipper, Princess.”

Twilight gave the best smile she could, given the circumstances. “I’m actively choosing to ignore the psychological ramifications of my nightmare until after the current crisis is resolved.”

Sunset opened her mouth, closed it again, considered her response, and finally reopened her mouth. “Fair play.”

Before Twilight could respond herself, Bandee opened a surprisingly nondescript set of doors and promptly prevented all further conversation on that topic. The group entered, getting a good look at Dedede’s room for the first time. For a king’s bedchamber, especially one of Dedede’s ego, it was far less opulent than Twilight had expected. Instead of a golden-studded four-poster bed, plush carpet, or intricate stonework in the walls, there was a simple mahogany king-sized bed, the same stonework as the rest of the castle, and a writing desk. Besides the king himself sitting at said desk, who was poring over a map and muttering to himself, a chess set sat on the end of it, and his hammer was leaned up against the side. The walls seemed to take the most of Dedede’s egomania, decorated with numerous pictures of himself.

Bandee cleared his throat. “King Dedede?”

The penguin started a bit and turned to face them. Twilight could see that he’d been hit pretty hard by the nightmares as well; he had bags under his eyes and seemed just as shaken as everyone else in the castle. “Ah, you all are here, great!” He held up the map to them, revealing a crudely-drawn path. “The Fountain’s right up here,” he pointed to a completely wrong area on the map, given that he wasn’t looking at it, “and if we hurry we could get there in five hours or so.”

“That’s not quick enough,” Bandana noted. “Whatever busted up the Fountain messed it up bad, so we’ll need a faster option to get up there as soon as possible.”

Sunset glanced at Twilight. “Could you fly us there? Levitating the three of us shouldn’t be too difficult for an alicorn.”

Twilight took a look at the map, noting the actual location of the Fountain of Dreams and considering the distance between them. She glanced at the clock. 5:23. Nodding, she spoke. “I could probably get us there by sunup, but I’d need a few minutes to recharge before I tried anything excessively magical.”

Bandee sighed. “We’ll take it, I guess.”

“Alright, that’s a plan!” Spike enthusiastically said. “I’m coming too, right?”

Everyone present raised an eyebrow at him, which was rather impressive given how much Twilight had to twist her neck in order to do so. “No.”

Spike pouted.

The Sun was just barely peeking over the horizon when the quartet landed in Rainbow Resort. Twilight panted hard for a few moments before she managed to gather up enough of her breath to speak. “That,” she gasped out, “took far more out of me than I thought it would.” She not-so-subtly glared at Dedede. “You’re a lot heavier than you look.”

Dedede grinned. “And it’s all muscle!”

Sunset snickered. “Now that’s a bit hard to believe. If you eat much more junk you’ll wind up rounder than Kirby!”

“Now listen here, Missy,” Dedede started, “I’ve got some tricks up my sleeves ‘cause of my roundness.”

“I could believe it,” said a new voice from above them, “On Popstar, it would appear that one’s sphericalness directly correlates to power.”

Everyone immediately turned towards the newcomer, though their exact reaction varied. Twilight fell back a bit, not willing to get herself into a fight just yet. Sunset flared her horn and readied three different environmental spells. Bandee pointed his spear at the voice, while Dedede took a fighting stance with his hammer.

Meta Knight’s eyes shined from the tree he was perched on. “So you came prepared. Good.” He grabbed his sword, flared his wings, and glided down to the group. “I suspect you came to the same conclusion I did?”

Dedede pointed his hammer down the path to the Fountain. “Somethin’s up with the Fountain of Dreams.”

“It would appear the Nightmare’s seal was weakening far faster than I predicted,” Meta Knight warned. “We must act quickly to prevent galactic consequences.”

Dedede rolled his shoulders. “Well then, let’s go beat up some bad dreams.”

The group continued down the path in tense silence, no one quite sure what to expect. Twilight, though, could almost feel an air of foreboding as they approached the Fountain’s clearing. As they broke the trees and came within visual range of the Fountain, both Twilight and Sunset cringed at the sudden wrongness of the magic around them. The magical field felt warped and twisted, as if trying to prey on every fear and insecurity it could. Twilight shivered–it felt far more like Sombra’s magic than she would’ve liked to remember.

The Fountain’s physical state wasn’t much better. The water it spewed looked more like oil than water, blacker than the darkest of nights. Black bolts of lightning-like magic periodically shot from the Fountain to Rainbow Resort’s ice spikes, the usually-serene setting distorted into an ugly facsimile of itself. Even the Fountain’s base looked cracked and its star-shaped emblems were dimmed to be nearly invisible.

The Star Rod, though, glowed brighter than ever.

Meta Knight took a sharp breath. “Shit,” he swore under his breath. “We’re too late to reinforce the seal.”

A low, smooth laugh echoed from everywhere and nowhere as a sudden breeze passed through the clearing. Rapidly, the wind amplified to the point that the group was hardly able to keep their balance, swirling around the Fountain faster and faster. Strangely, the wind seemed to discriminate between random debris and its target: the Fountain’s water. Defying all sense of gravitation, the black substance was drawn upwards into a distinct shape. It first formed a long, flowing cloak decorated with patterns of stars directly above the Fountain itself, filling it with a swirling–almost tornadic–mass of some substance. A disembodied pair of claw-like hands formed soon after, before finally the creature’s grinning head emerged.

“Oh, how good it is to be back!” the Nightmare laughed. Reaching over, he plucked the Star Rod from its position at the Fountain of Dream’s apex, its glow reaching a maximum. “Your pitiful little planet could never hope to keep me contained for long.” He smiled a sick smile, looking at the assemblage. “But I’m afraid this system belongs to me, now.”

“My ancestor sealed you for over four hundred years,” Meta Knight growled, shifting his sword back and flaring his wings, “and I shall complete her work. While I still draw breath, this planet will not fall.”

“Ah, so you are descended from that annoying little Astral,” Nightmare frowned. He gestured with his empty hand, summoning a shining, star-shaped projectile. “I suppose I’m killing you first, then.”

Nightmare launched the projectile, and everyone exploded into action.

Meta Knight, the swiftest of the five, nimbly dodged the attack by launching himself into the air. Quick as a bullet, he was upon the Nightmare, slashing away with his sword. To his dismay, however, Nightmare was perhaps even faster, shrinking back into his cloak and blocking every attempted strike.

Meta Knight’s eyes widened as Nightmare let out a low chuckle, and the knight had to drop to the ground to dodge a point-blank shot from the Star Rod itself. Swearing under his breath, Meta Knight quickly fell back to a far less disadvantageous position.

The others had not been idle while Meta Knight made his attack, however. As soon as the knight was out of the way, a pillar of flame erupted from Sunset’s horn, engulfing the Nightmare just as Dedede made a swing. His hammer, however, failed to connect with anything concrete, instead passing straight through where Nightmare should have been.

Twilight felt her hair rise on the back of her neck and instinctually cast a modification she had developed of her brother’s signature shield spell. She’d never had the same talent he did for defensive magicks, so she compensated for a relatively weak shield by casting multiple at once. In an instant, a triplet of nearly opaque violet spheres formed around her, and just in time to defend from Nightmare’s attack after he teleported behind her.

The shot from the Star Rod smashed straight through the first two of Twilight’s shields and was just barely stopped by the third. Wincing a bit at the feedback, Twilight turned to look at the Nightmare and grimaced. Before he could attempt another attack, though, he was interrupted by a shout from Bandee.

The small Waddle Dee had sprinted forward and jumped extraordinarily high for someone of his stature. Using Twilight’s final shield as a springboard, he brought down his spear in an attempt to attack Nightmare’s head.

Nightmare, of course, simply dragged his cloak up enough to block the hit, letting the spear glance off and Bandee slide to the ground, though he was saved from a rough landing by a quick burst of telekinesis from Twilight.

“That thing’s gotta be impenetrable!” Bandee exclaimed as Nightmare teleported again–this time behind Dedede.

“Indeed,” Meta Knight agreed in a low voice. He narrowed his eyes at the dueling Nightmare and Dedede. The king deftly dodged around one of Nightmare’s larger projectiles using his hammer to block a smaller shot. Meta pointed at the engagement. “But look, he must reveal himself to attack.”

“So bait out an attack and hit him hard, got it,” Sunset whispered back.

“That’s not exactly what I meant, but-”

“HEY DUMBASS!” Sunset shouted.

The fight between Dedede and Nightmare momentarily stalled as both combatants turned to look at her.

“Who’d you get to design your outfit, a washed-up rapper whose best piece was a one-hit wonder?” she taunted. “No one’s gonna take you seriously if you’ve got a blinged-out necklace and a crown that looks like it’s got uncooked spaghetti for horns!”

“Alright, change of plans,” Nightmare growled, “you first.”

Sunset grinned.

Nightmare floated out of Dedede’s reach and spent an abnormally long time charging his next attack.

Sunset very quickly stopped grinning. “Uh, Twilight? Some shields would be pretty neat right about now. I don’t think I can block whatever he’s charging.”

“I’m working on it!” Twilight shouted back, her horn aglow and her mind churning through magical equations at a staggering pace.

Nightmare’s cloak shot open as he released a wave of star-shaped projectiles, and Meta Knight immediately took off to get close. Bandee edged closer to the ponies. “Work faster!” he urged.

“Got it!” Twilight finally exclaimed, and a web of magical shields appeared in front of them. Most were simple planar shields, designed to protect against wide attacks. The innermost two were spherical, and held a somewhat counterintuitive property: they would fail in the face of a sweeping attack that approached from all directions at once, but against a single point attack, the shield would only grow stronger proportionally to the force exerted on the point.

To an external observer, all together the shield complex formed a shape akin to Twilight’s own cutie mark.

Twilight knew that Shining Armor definitely could have cast the same spell using half as many shields for the same relative strength, but her own spell did its job well enough. It stopped Nightmare’s attack in its tracks, granting the three beings inside a clear view of Meta Knight swinging his sword at the dark mage’s tornadic body.

And a clear view of said sword doing absolutely nothing.

Nightmare cackled and prepared another attack as Meta Knight rapidly flew backwards. “You fools! Your paltry weapons can do me no harm!”

“He’s invulnerable to physical attacks,” Meta Knight reported as he landed.

“We saw,” Twilight deadpanned.

Sunset narrowed her eyes. “I might have an idea. I’ll need a clear shot on him, though.”

Meta Knight shifted his sword again. “That’s easy enough.”

Twilight cringed a bit as she saw Dedede fruitlessly charge at Nightmare once again. “Bandee, you might want to clue Dedede in on the plan.”

“Noted,” Bandee replied, far more focused on the storm of incoming projectiles. “And also, SCATTER!”

The four took off in different directions. Bandee sprinted for his king, Sunset moved a bit closer to Nightmare, Meta Knight took off right for him, and Twilight fell back.

Nightmare raised an eyebrow at Meta’s approach, but sent an attack his way anyway. The moment his core was revealed, however, a burst of pure aquamarine magic seared directly through it. Sunset grinned as Meta Knight retreated again, confident in their success.

Nightmare, though, didn’t seem all that perturbed by the hole in his body. His reasoning quickly became apparent as he clutched the Star Rod harder and its glow intensified even further. Nearly instantly, his wound closed, and something in Twilight’s mind clicked.

“He’s drawing power from the Star Rod!” she shouted in realization. “We need to get it away from him!”

Nightmare’s grin finally dropped.

“We’ll have to keep him vulnerable long enough to relieve him of it,” Meta Knight noted. He looked at Dedede and Bandee. “I can take care of that. When you see an opening, do not let up.”

Sunset grinned viciously. “Oh, I have just the spell for that.”

Meta Knight nodded and took off to speak to the other two. At the very least, Twilight thought, with them having called out Nightmare’s weakness, he was unwilling to reveal his core, which meant they had a bit of reprieve from attacks. At least physical ones.

“You all still cannot hope to defeat me!” he taunted. “I can wait as long as is necessary to–what are you doing?”

Twilight glanced over at the native Dreamlanders confusedly as well. Dedede had picked Bandana Dee up and was winding up like he prepared to pitch the poor spearman. She blinked. Or that could be exactly what they planned to do.

The king shot for the skies in his launch of the Dee, tossing him in a parabolic arc that would bring him down spearhead-first onto Nightmare. Nightmare, in response, simply pulled his cloak a bit further upward to block Bandee, much in the same manner as he had earlier in the fight.

This, however, left a small flap of his cloak free at its bottom, a fact that Meta Knight heavily exploited. Launching forward just as Nightmare moved to block, the knight grabbed hold of the exposed flap and wrenched the entire cloak open, leaving Nightmare’s core completely vulnerable to attack.

Sunset took the first opportunity she could to cast Naught Bell’s Explosion, and Twilight dumped some of her own power into it for good measure. Nightmare realized the plot just too late to prevent the resultant explosion from incinerating a good half of his core and nearly forcing him to drop the Star Rod. Meta Knight forced the matter the rest of the way, swiftly flying up to Nightmare’s now-exposed hand and prying it open with his sword, freeing the Star Rod from his grasp. Once it was freed, Meta knocked it even further away–right under Dedede’s waiting hammer.

The self-proclaimed King of Dreamland grinned. “Lights out!”

He brought down the hammer, and in an explosion of light, the Star Rod shattered into eight pieces.

Nightmare looked genuinely panicked as an unseen force began dragging him back into the Fountain. “No!” he screamed. “I will not be denied my birthrig-”

He vanished before he could finish his sentence, and silence reigned in Rainbow Resort. The distortion to the area’s natural beauty ceased, but the Fountain’s magic seemed to be gone entirely. The water wasn’t even flowing anymore, and was simply sitting in its bowl.

The five heroes panted heavily. “That was…something,” Sunset said.

Meta Knight frowned down at the broken Star Rod. “This is not a permanent solution,” he reminded Dedede. “We must eventually reassemble the Star Rod, though in a way that does not release the Nightmare–unless we can destroy him entirely.”

Dedede scoffed and stretched. “Yeah, yeah. We can worry ‘bout all that later. Right now I’m down for a dip in the Fountain’s healing waters.”

“I doubt that will work,” Meta warned as Dedede made for the Fountain. “Without the Star Rod, the Fountain shouldn’t maintain its magical qualities.”

Bandee looked at Meta Knight. “You gonna try to stop him?”

There was a splash as Dedede jumped in the water and started paddling around. “There’s not really any reason to. He probably sustained the least damage out of all of us.”

Sunset frowned at the busted artifact. “Y’know, maybe we could help with figuring out how to kill him? Our magic seemed to do something, at least.”

“Why did our magic hurt him, anyway?” Twilight pondered. “Is it because we’re extrauniversal?”

“Perhaps,” Meta Knight replied. “I have my own theories, but I am not well-versed enough in the science of magic to test them.”

A loud gasp from above them prevented any more speculation, much to Twilight’s chagrin. Looking up, the group saw a newcomer that really would’ve been most welcome five minutes prior.

“Oh, so now he decides to show up?” Dedede exasperatedly asked as he got out of the Fountain, watching Kirby fly off on his Warp Star.

Meta Knight frowned. Well, Twilight at least assumed he was frowning all this time, given his general attitude. “This is…unideal. Kirby likely thinks we broke the Star Rod out of some villainous intention.”

“Did anyone actually think to tell him that we were forming a planetary defense league?” Sunset asked.

The five all looked at each other in varying levels of embarrassment.

“I told Bandee to do it!” Dedede claimed.

“I’m terrified of him!” Bandana exclaimed. “I thought Sunset would take care of it!”

“I don’t even know where he lives!” Sunset countered. “I would’ve thought Meta Knight’d tell him, if anyone.”

“I doubt he would react well to my presence.”

Everyone else looked at Meta Knight, to which he exuded the feeling of raising an eyebrow. “Is something on my mask?”

“You’re not gonna shift the blame onto Twilight?” Sunset queried. “I mean, I thought we had a pattern going…”

“That’s not the point of this,” Meta Knight retorted. “What we should be worrying about is that Kirby will likely try to fix the Star Rod before we can find a way to do it safely.”

“Right,” Twilight agreed. “So we’ll want to get the pieces as far away as possible.”

Dedede frowned down at them. “Okay then, I’ve got some ideas.” He separated two of the pieces. “Bandee, could you get these to Whispy and Paint Roller?”

“Easily,” Bandana replied.

“I know Mr. Shine and Mr. Bright spend a lot of time in Butter Building nowadays, and Kracko’s been hanging around in Grape Garden,” Dedede added, looking at Meta Knight. “That’s close enough to Orange Ocean. Could you get two pieces to them?”

“I can do two better,” Meta said. “I can hold on to one myself, and I know Vul has been itching to try out a new Heavy Mole design. Yogurt Yard should be big enough for that.”

“We can take one of the pieces back to your castle, as well,” Twilight offered.

Dedede grinned. “Perfect. I’ll keep watch of the last piece here. Hopefully we can get Kirby to stop before he gets here, though.”

“In that case,” Meta Knight said, pulling out a communicator of some sort and handing it off to Sunset, “for communication purposes, hold on to this. I only have the one on me right now, but it is faster for me to fly here than it is to fly to Castle Dedede.” He nodded at Dedede. “I’ll inform you of any updates to the plan in person.”

“Alright then, we have our missions!” Bandee called all attention to him. “Operation Stop Kirby from Accidentally Ending the World is a-go!”

Author's Note

The Scourge of Dreamland, Nightmare
This mysterious mage was sealed on Popstar centuries ago. Using the Fountain of Dreams, he can draw power from the nightmares of everyone on the planet–a practice that could grant him theoretically infinite power, given enough time.

I really need to stop finishing and publishing chapters at 4AM, but also that's kind of on me if I start a writing session at 9 in the evening and just can't stop myself.

Now, my rendition of Adventure won't necessarily be too dissimilar to the original, so expect only two chapters of it. After all, the main difference to Kirby's path here is a detour to Castle Dedede for a new boss fight.

Time to see if Twilight can hold her own in a 1v1 in Chapter Eleven: The Hero of Dreamland!

Chapter XII: A Nightmare's Aftermath

Sunset had to work to keep herself from gaping as she watched Twilight and Kirby’s battle. An entire mountaintop–probably nearly a gigatonne of solid granite–had been blown apart. And then, as if just to further rub in the insanity of Kirby’s power, Sunset got to bear witness to him one-upping the destructive force of an enraged Twilight Sparkle by beating her down so quickly a mushroom-shaped cloud of dust emerged where she hit the ground. It was a horrifying display of power.

Sunset cringed as she felt the phantom pressure on her horn increase again. Filling in for a load-bearing wall was more than the average unicorn would’ve been able to do, and even though she was well above-average, she estimated that she had maybe an hour and a half maximum before she ran out of mana. Granted, given that the other option was to just let the roof collapse in on her, she was willing to put in the work. Bandee had already asked the Meta-Knights for assistance, and apparently a construction crew was on the way. Still wanting to be prepared for a worst-case scenario, the general had left soon after, trying to drag as many unconscious castle residents outside of its walls as possible.

She still nearly jumped out of her skin when Kirby teleported back into the room. He angled his staff at her, as if expecting an attack. Of course, Sunset just responded by jumping back a bit as another section of wall crumbled. She winced and redirected some of her strength to replace the lost load. “Listen, if I stop doing this, the building’ll come down on both of us,” she explained. “The Star Rod fragment’s in the treasury. We’ve got a few of the Meta-Knights on the way to fix the wall, so you might want to just grab it and get out of here.”

Kirby nodded and ran off, and Sunset sighed in relief at the fact that he didn’t attack her on sight. Even with being able to heal physical injuries near-instantly, this constant stress could not be good for her blood pressure. At this point, it didn’t even matter how much power she was taking with her. She just needed to get the hell off this planet.

The weight shifted and she swore under her breath again. First chance she got, she resolved to herself, she was getting the fuck off this rock, with or without the others. She’d been here for under two weeks and had already gotten herself into four life-threatening situations. It was just far too much of a hassle to manage even her own survival at this point, even for the potential power this universe held.

So why did her heart pang at the thought of leaving the others behind?

Sunset shook her head. The others couldn’t be considered her friends. She’d never had friends, and anypony she’d thought was one had betrayed her. Any compassion she was feeling was purely just a general feeling of pity for other sapient creatures. She was too far gone in her goals for something like friendship to throw a wrench into things.

…Right?

She grit her teeth at her own thoughts. Of course, she reassured herself. The only reason I’m even sticking around is because Twilight’s our best shot to find a way back. If I had a way to Equestria faster on my own I’d take it!

Her face fell into a contemplative expression as her mind ran with the thought. There might, in fact, be a way back to Equestria! Making sure to still keep most of her concentration on stopping the building from collapsing, Sunset grinned slightly in realization.

“Any wish, huh?” she muttered.

“You say something?” she heard Bandee ask from behind her, and she nearly jumped out of her skin again.

“Jesus Christ, Bandee, try not to scare the person holding up an entire fucking building,” Sunset snapped back without answering the question.

Bandee frowned–well, Sunset assumed he was frowning based on his eyes–at the lack of a wall. “Realistically speaking, I don’t think the entire building would come down, but it’d still cause quite a bit of damage.”

“Yeah how about you try deadlifting several tonnes of rock and get back to me on how that feels,” Sunset grunted. “I think saying the entire building was a perfectly acceptable hyperbole, and a significant proportion of the castle collapsing would kill us both either way. You did get everyone outside, right?”

Bandee nodded. “Everyone’s out. Kirby actually helped with that for the last few.”

“Right, he likes saving everyone.” Sunset cringed again. “I can’t even blame him for the wall, Twilight was the one that blew it up.”

“Well, Vul’s only a few minutes out, apparently, with enough of a crew to take it off your hooves,” Bandee assured.

“Ugh,” Sunset groaned, “why him?”

Bandee shrugged. “According to Meta Knight, he heads all of the engineering stuff in the organization.”

Before Sunset could respond, there was a bright flash of light as Spike popped back into existence right where he’d been swallowed. Sitting down hard, he rubbed his forehead. “What…what was that?”

“Welcome to my world,” Bandee said. “If you’re fighting Kirby and small enough for him to inhale, good luck avoiding it.”

Spike blinked and looked down at his arms. “I’m glad I’m still here, but that was weird.” He looked around at the utterly destroyed room. “What happened here?”

“Well, Kirby’s inhale is, obviously, nonlethal,” Sunset exposited. “But uh…no one ever bothered to let Twilight know about that. So she went, in a word, apeshit–and she threw Kirby through the wall.”

Spike gaped at the open air. “Are they okay?”

Sunset shrugged. “Kirby’s fine, but Twilight probably took some hard hits out there.”

Spike’s face instantly turned distraught. “Twilight’s hurt?” he exclaimed.

Sunset cringed for the nth time. “Yeah, but right now I’m just desperately hoping she’s just unconscious.” She twitched as the ceiling groaned again. “I can’t afford to lose concentration considering the alternative.”

“Don’t worry about that one, Miss Shimmer,” a new voice called from the entryway. They all turned to look at the newcomer, a Trident Knight. Rather than wielding his signature weapon, though, he held a shore, and he wore a bright orange hard hat. “We can take it from here!”

Following the Trident Knight was a veritable flood of other hard hat-wearing Meta-Knights, including Captain Vul himself. The large bird clicked his beak as he assessed the damage before pointing to several points on the ceiling. “We need shores here, here, and here,” he gruffly commanded. As the group with beams ran over to begin assembly, he pointed to another group of Meta-Knights. “I need half of you to begin gathering material from the surrounding area. I’ll speak with Dedede about the original ‘prints’ design as soon as possible. I want the other half of you to set up a temporary infirmary for the wounded out front.” He turned to Bandee. “Where do you keep your food stores?”

Bandee snapped up. “The kitchen’s a bit of a ways through the halls. I can lead them there, if you’d like.”

Vul nodded. “That would be best, yes.”

“Alright, Miss, you can stop holding up the ceiling now,” one of the construction crew told Sunset. “The support structure’s in place.”

Sunset tentatively reduced her active support of the ceiling and, when it didn’t collapse in on them, fully shut off her magic. She sighed deeply, releasing all of the tension she’d built up, but grinned nonetheless. She’d fought Kirby, successfully held up a building, and wasn’t suffering any mana burn–hell, she felt like she had enough mana left to teleport down to Twilight just fine. Sure, she was still pretty exhausted, but she’d be fine after a bit of rest. “Mind if I grab an extra tomato from the kitchens?” she asked, turning to Bandee and Vul. “I feel like Twilight’s gonna need it.”

“Sure!” Bandee replied.

“Good, now all of you need to get out of here,” Vul grunted. “As of now, this is an active construction zone and none of you have hard hats on.”

Alicorn physiology, Twilight decided, was both a blessing and a curse.

On one hoof, they were some of the hardiest things around. Unlike most other creatures, alicorns’ mana stores refilled fast enough that, in an emergency, they could metabolize pure magic. Should a damaged cell or group of cells be irreparable, this use of magic as energy could fuel their replacement far faster than other organisms. Even in an oxygen-free environment, or if the heart or lungs stopped functioning properly, an alicorn could likely survive for several hours–long enough for their body to naturally repair itself, assuming the necessary brain activity was still functional and given the proper nutrient stores. Thus, Twilight could theoretically survive pretty much anything that didn’t outright kill her immediately.

On the other hoof, that meant that she was still alive and could very much feel pain.

The physical pain as she came to was already bad enough. She’d never broken a bone before, and despite having read a few medical textbooks once just for the sake of it, she hadn’t expected the pain to be nearly as excruciating as it was. Honestly, she had a newfound respect for the fact that Rainbow had been more concerned with liking a book than with a broken limb, though some part of Twilight’s mind that somehow wasn’t entirely overwhelmed unhelpfully pointed out that Rainbow had access to painkillers during that incident. A luxury that, as that part of her mind was ever-so-happy to add, she currently did not have.

Of course, as excruciating as her two broken limbs were, most of her pain was not physical. No, as her mind began to catch up on recent events, she felt the far more stabbing pang of emotional pain.

She’d watched her little brother–the dragon she’d raised–get eaten alive by a force of pure hunger. Under two weeks in another universe and Spike was dead because of her own foolishness. She should have known that he’d sneak out to try and help. Everything she knew about Spike should have warned her of that. She should’ve been more cautious about him being in the castle. She should’ve just given up as soon as he joined the fight and dragged him away from it. She should’ve done something, anything, Twilight berated herself, instead of just staring on in horror.

Had she the tears for it, Twilight would have wept. Her body, however, refused to allow such a waste of water, given that nearly all of it was going to repairing damaged tissue. Instead, she opened her eyes and simply gazed upward at the starry night sky, shocked at everything that had occurred. Despite her mind being in near-complete chaos, some part of her was still organizing everything she saw, such as the relative sizes of Popstar’s four moons varying wildly, and one even seeming to have leaves.

Twilight blinked. Wait, four?

“Alright, Twilight, eat up,” she heard Sunset say from off to the side. The mysterious new fourth moon, which Twilight’s mind finally registered as being a levitating maxim tomato, fell downward, and Twilight instinctively opened her mouth and began chewing. The feeling of her bones rearranging themselves back into their proper positions was rather uncomfortable, if she was being honest, but thankfully it was over in only a few moments, her physical aches and pains fading away.

Twilight sat up and froze. Her mind simply refused to work after she looked in Sunset’s direction, mostly due to the small dragon standing next to her.

Spike gave a sheepish smile and waved. “Hi, Twi.”

Twilight gaped for half a moment as her brain struggled to comprehend the fact that Spike was still alive, but she reacted far faster than she could think. In an instant, she had flown over to Spike and gripped him tightly in an embrace. Once she was sure he was real and that this wasn’t simply a dying hallucination, she released him and looked at him with a grin on her face. Tears openly beginning to flow, she hugged him again. “You’re alive!” she exclaimed, relieved.

Spike squirmed for a moment, realized that he wasn’t getting out of the hug, and hugged her back.

The pair of siblings took a moment of silence to simply take in the embrace before Twilight eventually released Spike. She sniffed a bit and wiped the tears from her face, but her wide smile remained. “I thought I lost you when Kirby…when he…” she trailed off, unable to finish her sentence.

Sunset cringed. “Yeah, I kinda forgot to mention that Kirby’s inhale is nonlethal. That was on me. Sorry.”

Twilight sighed. “At least we’re all alright in the end. And I suppose I’ll have to apologize to Kirby for…” her smile dropped and a haunted look came over her face. “By Celestia’s starry mane I tried to kill him.”

Sunset tilted her head with a confused expression. “You thought he’d killed Spike. I’d be more concerned if you just let that slide.”

Twilight shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. I wanted him dead by my own hooves. I’m a Princess of Equestria! I’m not supposed to react like that!”

Sunset raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

Twilight nodded, staring down at her hooves in shame. “Even if somepony seriously injured Princess Luna, I don’t think Princess Celestia would want to kill them.”

Sunset snorted, but prevented herself from chortling upon Spike shooting her an angry look. “You’ve never seen Celestia angry, have you?”

“And you have?” Twilight asked.

Sunset froze, as if suddenly realizing that she’d said far too much. After a pregnant pause, she finally replied. “You’re not the first student she’s ever had.” Before Twilight could inquire further as to what that was supposed to mean, Sunset continued with a dismissive wave of her hoof. “Besides, Celestia’s like a bajillion years old. If anything, she’s the weird one.”

“Yeah, but-” Twilight tried.

“Plus, if I ever found out that someone hurt my brother,” Sunset added, “they’d only wish they were dead.”

Twilight looked up, surprised. “You have a brother?”

Sunset cringed and actually looked ashamed for once. “Yeah, but I…haven’t seen him in a while.”

“Hey, I’m so sorry to interrupt,” Spike spoke up, “but given that this conversation is about me, do I get to say anything?”

Both ponies blinked in surprise and looked at him, and Sunset gestured to give him the floor.

“Twi, I think it’s really cool that you care about me enough to try and avenge me,” Spike said, “but we probably need to all say sorry to Kirby.”

Sunset rolled her eyes. “As long as he apologizes first for trying to put the Star Rod back together after we told him not to.”

Twilight gasped. “The Star Rod!” she realized. “What happened to our fragment?”

Sunset shrugged. “I let Kirby have it after you two practically blew up a mountain.”

“You WHAT?” Twilight and Spike shouted simultaneously.

Sunset rubbed her forehead. “Yep, beginnings of mana burn, gotta get some extra rest tonight,” she mumbled. “It was either hand over the fragment or let the building collapse since you guys took out a load-bearing wall, apparently. So yeah, I had to hold it up. Myself.”

Now it was Twilight’s turn to look sheepish. “Sorry, I…wasn’t thinking straight,” she answered. Shaking her head to clear her thoughts, she continued. “But what about Nightmare? We don’t know if Kirby can beat him, and–no offense to King Dedede–but he probably can’t hold off Kirby for long.”

“At this point,” Sunset sighed, “I think the only thing we can do is wait and hope that Meta Knight was right.”

At that exact moment, a cataclysmic BOOM washed over most of Planet Popstar. All over half of the planet, its denizens looked up in shock and awe at the sight, the Equestrians included. Twilight could barely believe her eyes as she watched a massive explosion envelop Popstar’s largest moon. A solid third of the satellite was missing, carved out as if some angry god had taken the universe’s largest ice cream scoop to it. Twilight couldn’t even make out any debris–it was like the matter caught in the explosion had simply ceased to exist.

Sunset and Spike both seemed equally as shocked. “What the fuck?” the former asked.

Twilight didn’t even bother to comment on Sunset’s profanity, her mind desperately trying to figure out whether or not this was a gross violation of conservation of energy.

“Maybe we should get back to the castle?” Spike suggested. “If Dedede’s back he might have some answers.”

Dedede, as it turned out, only had one answer when he arrived an hour or so later with Kirby in tow.

“Kirby blew up half the moon to kill Nightmare.”

Twilight was left to perform her best imitation of a fish for a few seconds and Spike nearly fell off of her back from the shock. Sunset, though, apparently decided to go for the dramatic option. She nabbed a glass of water from a passing Waddle Dee and promptly performed a spit take. “What the hell?”

The hard hat-clad Dee glared at Sunset, who sheepishly levitated the empty glass back over, to which the Waddle Dee rolled their eyes and went back to the kitchens to fill it up again.

Kirby just cheerfully waved at the group from atop Dedede’s head.

The penguin growled, reached up, and tossed Kirby to the ground. “Don’t go up there!”

Kirby bounced back up instantly, grinning at the irate king. Before he could retaliate, though, the puffball turned to the three Equestrians. Managing to actually look ashamed of himself, Kirby scuffed his feet on the floor. “Sorry,” he eventually managed to articulate.

Twilight sighed. “I’m sorry, too. My actions were…unreasonable.”

Kirby looked rather perplexed by her apology and Sunset raised an eyebrow. “I thought we’d already established that that wasn’t the case?”

“Reacting to a loved one being put in danger with anger at the perpetrator is perfectly natural,” Meta Knight’s voice suddenly chipped in from above them, causing the entire group to jump.

“Would it kill ya to enter a room normally for once?” Dedede grumbled. “Why’re you here, anyway?”

“To oversee the repair operations on your castle,” Meta Knight answered as he landed. “Speaking of, Captain Vul would like to speak with you regarding the design of and possible renovations to your boxing room.”

Dedede grumbled again–something Twilight suspected was due to his tiredness–and stomped off towards the boxing room. Meta Knight, meanwhile, turned to the rest of the group.

“Well done, everyone,” he congratulated. “The Nightmare has been vanquished for good, with only minimal casualties.”

“Minimal?” Twilight asked, a concerned tinge in her voice.

“No deaths,” Meta clarified. “At least as far as I am aware. The Meta-Knights sustained a few minor injuries and I’ve received Vul’s damage report for the castle.”

Kirby seemed to sigh in relief.

Meta nodded at the three Equestrians. “I must say, I certainly owe you all a favor for agreeing to put yourselves in such a perilous situation.” Before any of them could respond, however, he turned to Kirby again. “Though, you may want to apologize to Lunaris as soon as you can. He will most certainly be rather miffed by a chunk of that size being taken out of him.”

As Kirby embarrassedly rubbed his back and everyone else shared a chuckle, no one noticed another small pink sphere slink his way outside.

Marx grinned to himself as he ascended Sky Tower later that night. Sure, getting all the way to Nutty Noon in only a few hours was a heck of a hassle and climbing all the way up the tower was exhausting, but the top of Sky Tower was one of the few places on Popstar one could reliably speak to its celestial bodies. And Marx simply could not pass an opportunity like this up. With such a recent injury on his mind, Lunaris would be far easier to manipulate.

Marx nearly cackled, but made sure to keep himself as quiet as possible. Fools, the lot of them, he let his thoughts indulge. No one suspected a damn thing, and hero types were oh so easy to manipulate into doing what he wanted. He certainly wouldn’t be able to summon Nova on his own, but with just a bit of help, true power would be within his grasp.

Ah, but he was getting ahead of himself. Reaching the apex of Sky Tower, he grinned up at the large form of Lunaris, Popstar’s closest, largest, and sapient moon. “Well howdy there, Lunaris!” Marx shouted.

Communication with celestial bodies was always a tricky business. They communicated mentally more than anything else, so Marx always had to watch his own thoughts to make sure no part of his actual plans leaked through. Though with Lunaris’s injury and Marx’s own skill, he knew he could pull this off flawlessly.

Lunaris heaved a mental sigh. Good evening, Marx. What do you want?

Marx faked as good of a frown as he could–which was pretty good, in his opinion. “I just wanted to stop by. I heard about–well, saw, really–your injury and figured that’s gotta hurt.”

Lunaris exuded the feeling of raising a nonexistent eyebrow. Really, now?

“Well, that’s not all,” Marx conceded. “You see, I was paying attention to the Popstar grapevine, and I overheard some things you might want to know.”

Oh? Lunaris asked.

“Yeah,” Marx continued. “The big thing is that your ex was shittalking you again.”

Lunaris mentally sighed again. What was Solaria saying this time?

“Well, it started off pretty standard–calling you a bastard, no-good layabout, that kinda thing,” Marx falsely reported.

Not all that unusual for her, Lunaris agreed. There’s a reason I broke things off with her.

Alright, time to bring out the big guns. “Yeah, I thought that was just normal insults, too,” Marx said, “but then she called your mom a hoe.”

Lunaris’s mental space went deathly silent, and for a moment Marx was a bit worried he’d gone too far–that rather than angry, Lunaris would simply refuse to accept it.

It turned out that his worry was unfounded, though, as when Lunaris replied it was with absolute vehemence. Solaria knows how much my mother meant to me, Lunaris mentally growled. She’ll pay for this come morning. Thank you for letting me know, Marx.

“Not a problem, buddo!” Marx cheerily replied. “Thought it was a good idea to keep you in the know, y’know?”

Lunaris didn’t respond, instead speeding off towards the horizon, and Marx let his grin once again overtake his face. Now all that was left was to wait for the two to really start duking it out and grab…Kirby.

Marx hummed as he considered Lunaris’s injury. Perhaps tricking Kirby wasn’t the right play, here, if the puffball had done all that. Sure, he’d have gone after Kirby if he had no other options, but–Marx’s grin returned–he had more options than just Kirby, now. He needed someone powerful enough to gather all the summoning stars, but not so powerful that they could defeat him after Nova granted him power. Someone who was cunning enough to understand the weight of the situation, but not so shrewd that they’d see through his plans. Someone who would stay motivated through their own plans, but would be conflicted enough for Marx to jump in with his own wish. Someone who, above all else, the Star Rod resonated with.

Or–Marx full-on cackled, now–perhaps somepony.

Oh yes, even if he would have to actively travel with her, getting Shim Sham to gather the summoning stars for him would do nicely.

Author's Note

The Stations of Canon may be directing Milky Way Wishes to happen, but you know what they say about butterflies and tornadoes. With more options than just Kirby to manipulate that could conceivably get him to Nova, why take any unnecessary risks when Marx could get Sunset to do it instead?

Before Marx begins to execute his plans, though, it's about time we took a look back over at Equestria. After all, Discord has some potential information to share, Luna's been looking for Glim Glam, and it's about time some vines started sprouting.

Chapter XIII: A Thorny Situation

Despite the oppressive pre-summer heat, Sunburst still felt a chill run down his spine as he and Princess Luna made their way towards where they thought Starlight had wound up. The princess had apparently narrowed down the possible location of his old friend to one of Equestria’s many small deserts. With the Summer Sun Celebration under a week away and the populus beginning to get suspicious of Princess Twilight’s lack of public appearances, Princess Luna had decided to act as quickly as possible. Which was to say, she flew all the way to the Crystal Empire herself as soon as she had zeroed in on Starlight’s location, grabbed Sunburst, and filled him in on the way.

To say that Sunburst was shocked that the princesses suspected his foalhood friend of having formed a cult would be an understatement. Hay, it was disturbing to even think about it. But the princesses, ever the paragons of forgiveness (and pragmatism, Sunburst privately thought), had decided to take the risk and make contact anyway. With most of the Guard in Canterlot preparing for the Celebration and the speed at which Princess Luna had flown northward, the only ponies making contact were himself and the princess, not at all helping Sunburst’s wary attitude.

Luna still seemed somewhat upset with him, though far less so than Princess Twilight’s friends had been. He understood, of course; he was equally upset with himself. Despite multiple long hours and late nights working in the portal room, he had been unable to get any closer to locating the universe the wayward princess had gotten off to. For goodness’ sake, he was operating on three hours of sleep most days at this point!

Sunburst blinked. Huh, maybe that was part of the problem.

Regardless, the chill he felt was less due to the potentially irate princess and more due to the sight before him. Laid out in the dusty valley were two rows of identical houses, all constructed out of a dreary beige brick with dull brown roofing. Not even the late afternoon sun, beginning to light up the sky in the glow of sunset, was able to make the village look interesting. The only splash of color in the entire town were the doors, which were either a faded red, faded cyan, or more brown. Hay, from Sunburst and Luna’s vantage point well above the village, it appeared that even the ponies themselves were desaturated.

The town’s structure, though, confused Sunburst something fierce. Simplified urban planning was something he could get behind, sure–he’d lost count of the number of times he’d gotten lost in Canterlot's and the Crystal Empire’s twisting roads, countless alleys, and design better suited to an art contest than a city plan. But this was just extreme. The only asymmetry in the entire village was a single house at the end of the complex, only compromising its bilateral symmetry with a chimney. On either side of it were two plots of farmland, each of which should be enough to comfortably sustain–Sunburst did some quick mental math–around sixty or so ponies.

The arid climate, though, seemed to do the farmers no favors. With how small the yield looked from their perch and the number of houses, Sunburst recalculated the village’s population to forty ponies, maximum. And that was if they were pushing it–the food stores seemed low enough that, barring any extreme fasting, thirty was a comfortable maximum. That was barely enough to cover all of the upkeep needs for a town like this, and Sunburst doubted that the ponies that ended up here had the necessary skills for something like that.

Luna, though, was concerned for an entirely different reason. Grumbling, the alicorn flared her horn and teleported a thick stack of paper in front of her, which she began leafing through. “Confound these modern laws,” she muttered discontentedly. “In my day, we wouldn’t bother with these trivialities.”

“What’s wrong?” Sunburst queried.

“Modern Equestrian tax codes,” Luna grumbled. “This whole village does not exist in Our records, ergo they have not been paying taxes. This entire ‘proper’ rigamarole feels wholly unnecessary. Before my banishment, We would simply demand Our dues be paid. With force, if necessary.”

Sunburst gulped a bit at the stark reminder that Princess Luna, as much as she was adjusting to the modern world, was from a different time. “I’m sure the tax evasion is a problem,” he stammered, “but honestly, I’m a bit more concerned about the potential ponies’ rights abuses.”

Luna nodded. “Of course. But such accusations are usually far more difficult to prove in the-” she rolled her eyes “-modern courts my sister has implemented. Crimes against the state are far simpler to handle. Should Miss Glimmer prove redeemable and open to aiding us, though, We shall offer a formal pardon.” She refocused back on the village and teleported the legal code away again. “Regardless, we must initiate contact.”

“R-right,” Sunburst agreed.

The two trekked down the craggy slope with no further conversation, but their concern continually increased as they got closer to the village. As Sunburst had noticed from above, the residents’ coats were far more desaturated than the usual pony’s. That was only the tip of the iceberg, however. All of the residents seemed to have a permanent smile, but based on their mannerisms and strained faces even Sunburst could tell it was forced. Most distressing, though, were the cutie marks. Or more accurately, the cutie mark, singular.

Every pony in the village had the same cutie mark: a pair of parallel gray line segments forming an equals sign. Sunburst shivered. Between all of this, the town felt horrifyingly unnatural–as if the harmonious nature of magic itself had been perverted into a twisted vision of order. Then one of the ponies’ ever-present grins split as they opened their mouth, and it only got worse from there.

“Welcome!”

The usually comforting phrase felt purely wrong. The first syllable was drawn out far longer than was natural, placing emphasis in the wrong place. And the tone. Sunburst shivered again. The tone spoke more of a welcoming for indoctrination, not one of a warm greeting.

A second “Welcome!” was shot their way, and Sunburst forced himself to consider their objective, much like what he assumed Luna was doing. That quickly led his thoughts down another rabbit hole, though. He still couldn’t believe the princesses’ conclusion. Sure, Starlight was a bit vindictive at times and somewhat asocial, but there was no way in Tartarus she’d stoop so low as to create a community like this.

Right?

Oh by Celestia’s sun two of them were walking right towards them.

"Welcome!” the unicorn stallion said as Sunburst retreated a bit, placing Princess Luna between him and the pair. If the two noticed, they didn’t show it. “Pardon my forwardness,” he blinked and tilted his head, “but are you an alicorn?”

“I am Princess Luna,” the royal introduced herself. “We are here to meet with your leader.”

“I’m sure Starlight will just love to meet you!” the other stallion, an earth pony, exclaimed. It seemed genuine, but Sunburst still had to suppress a shudder. “I’m Double Diamond, and this here is Party Favor!”

“Salutations,” Luna said, politely nodding to the two of them. “I presume that this Starlight is in the house at the end of the rows?”

Party Favor nodded. “Starlight’s always happy to meet newcomers to our little village!” he exposited, the grin never leaving his face.

The group started forward, moving ever-closer to that final building. “Starlight founded this town, you know!” Double Diamond added.

“Oh, we are well aware of that,” Luna responded. In only a few moments, mostly prodded forward by the princess’s long strides, they had reached the doorstep. Cheerful as ever, Double Diamond opened the door.

“Starlight! We have some new visitors!” he called out.

As they waited for Starlight to arrive, Sunburst took in the scenery. It wasn’t anything special–the house’s interior was just as drab as its exterior. The only thing that was really notable was the framed picture of an equal sign hung up on the wall and a few potted plants. Really, it was quite far from what he would’ve expected, given what he remembered of Starlight’s personality.

The door on the opposite wall finally opened, and Sunburst got a good look at his foalhood friend for the first time in over a decade. And honestly, it looked like she hadn’t changed all that much. She had the same vibrant lilac coat, the same two-tone mane, though it seemed that she’d dropped the pigtails she’d liked to style it with as a filly. Her grin felt almost rehearsed, as if she prepared for this sort of event regularly. “Welc-”

She cut herself off, however, the moment she caught sight of Sunburst. As soon as their eyes met, Starlight froze in place and her face seemed to go through several emotions in only a few seconds. “Sunburst?” she asked, disbelief coloring her voice.

Sunburst gave her a shaky smile and a slight wave. “H-hey, Starlight. It’s been a while.”

Applejack sighed into her drink as the sunset glowed through the windows. Berry’s Barrel was one of the few proper taverns in Ponyville, where one could go to have a drink and get some good old fashioned bartender’s advice. And at this point, Applejack sorely needed somepony to talk to. She and Rainbow still weren’t really on speaking terms, Rarity had sequestered herself away in her boutique to throw herself into her work, Fluttershy hadn’t left her cottage in days, and Pinkie was still just trying to make the best of their situation, as if she could just smile away Twilight’s disappearance. Applejack scoffed. Even if there was nothing to be done, they should still at least be trying to get Twilight back.

Despite the general white noise of the building, it seemed that the bartender had heard her. Berry Punch, the owner and head bartender of the tavern, looked up from where she was cleaning a glass and cocked an eyebrow. “You alright there, Applejack?”

Applejack sighed from her seat at the bar. “To be honest, Berry, Ah’m not.”

Berry gave her a sympathetic look. “In the mood to talk about what ails you?”

Applejack frowned. “Ah’m not sure how much Ah’m actually allowed to say…”

“Well, if it’s classified information, I guess I really shouldn’t know, huh?” Berry responded with a cringe. To anypony else, it would’ve seemed genuine, but Applejack could see right through the façade of disinterest. Berry was one of the most prominent gossipers in Ponyville. Oh, she wouldn’t share ponies’ information without permission, of course, but she was the type to want to know everything. There was no way she wouldn’t try to pry as much information out of Applejack as possible. She needed a way to throw her off her trail, stat.

Applejack sighed again. “Well, Ah suppose Ah can tell ya that Dash ain’t been talkin’ to me again.”

Berry frowned. “The two of you had another falling out?”

Applejack waved a hoof. “Eh, sorta. We’re probably just bein’ stubborn again, though.”

Berry rolled her eyes. “To be frank, the two of you seem to get in some spat or another every other week.” Her expression softened. “But I know nothing can keep you six apart for long!” The purple mare grinned up at Applejack. “You’re the Elements, after all!”

Applejack cringed again and stared down at her still completely-untouched drink; she’d ordered the beer several minutes ago and just couldn’t bring herself to actually drink it. “Yeah,” she eventually agreed. “We are.”

Before Berry could express her clear confusion at Applejack’s response, the ground suddenly rumbling cut off all conversation in the tavern. Ponies looked around in confusion as the noise only increased, and that confusion quickly turned to fear as the sound of screaming started filtering in from outside. Applejack spun around and sat straight up on the bar stool, her ears swiveling around the brim of her Stetson.

Then the screaming inside started as a window shattered and a jet black vine smashed through.

“What in tarnation?” Applejack shouted, staring at the offending piece of foliage. She got up and trotted over to the now unmoving vine for a closer look. It was covered in sharp, bright blue thorns, and the vine itself seemed jagged with hard, nearly perpendicular bends in the wood at random intervals. The farmer had to suppress a shiver at the sight. Applejack knew plants, but this just felt wrong.

She had no time to consider it further though, as the door slammed open to admit a panting filly. Applejack glanced over and, narrowing her eyes, immediately began making her way towards the newcomer.

“Apple Bloom!” she said, her tone somewhere between surprise and scolding. “What’re you doin’ here?”

Apple Bloom panted a couple more times before inhaling. “Ah was lookin’ all over the farm for you but then Big Mac said you went to the Barrel,” she started rambling a bit, “so Ah came here to get you but there were so many vines in town Ah I had to run and-”

“Get to the point, Sugarcube,” Applejack softly cut her off.

Apple Bloom took a deep breath. “The vines’re goin’ after our trees!”

Applejack’s eyes widened and she started galloping towards the door. “Why didn’tcha lead with that?”

She stopped short as soon as she got out of the building, though, Apple Bloom catching up moments later. “‘Cause it’s not just the farm,” she answered.

All around Ponyville, massive black vines, just like the one that smashed through the Barrel’s window, were sprouting from the ground. Even as Applejack watched, they twisted and contorted in ways completely unnatural for vines. Above them, strange spiked clouds moved around haphazardly, and she could definitely make out a rainbow trail pursuing one. Applejack’s jaw dropped. “What in the world…?”

“Yes, this situation is quite dreadful,” Rarity’s voice suddenly interjected. The two earth ponies whirled around to face her. The white-coated mare and her sister trotted forward, the former looking around with an expression somewhere between revulsion and disdain and the latter sticking close next to her, though Sweetie Belle’s eyes did light up upon seeing Apple Bloom. “All these vines simply ruin Ponyville’s small town charm!” Rarity continued.

“And they mess with magic, too!” Sweetie added. She shrieked as another vine burst from the ground not far from the group and shuffled even closer to Rarity.

The mare wrapped a comforting foreleg over her sister’s withers. “Stay close, Sweetie. We don’t know what else these things are capable of.”

“So what do y’all reckon we can do ‘bout ‘em?” Applejack questioned, still stunned by the floral invasion.

Rarity frowned. “Well, ordinarily I would suggest we locate the source of this predicament and use the Elements on the ne’er-do-well that caused it, but…”

“Since Twi ain’t here,” Applejack finished, “we can’t do that.”

“Well, yes, that much is obvious,” Rarity said, “but I am uncertain if there even is a single entity at fault, here.”

“Now how do ya figure that?” Applejack asked.

“Strange, unpredictable weather and invasive plants seem to me more like an issue with the Forest,” Rarity explained. She frowned again. “But, if my memory of grade-school history serves me well, the Everfree hasn’t expanded one iota in all of recorded history!”

“So somethin’ has to be causin’ this!” Applejack retorted.

A rainbow contrail descended right in front of them, depositing a battered Rainbow Dash on the ground. Given how parts of her mane and tail were smoking from what Applejack presumed were small lightning strikes, she looked like she’d picked a fight with the clouds and lost. “Yeah, and I’ve got a solid guess on who’s been messing everything up!” she almost snarled as she stared back up at the sky.

“Would you be ever so kind as to enlighten us, Rainbow?” Rarity asked. “Assuming, that is, that you and Applejack are on speaking terms again?”

Applejack rolled her eyes. “Ah think this’s a might bit more important than me and Dash’s stubbornness.”

“What she said,” Rainbow agreed. She pointed upward. “The sunset tonight was scheduled for 7:52. And it’s-” the Ponyville bell tower started ringing out, “-eight o’clock.”

Rarity gasped. “But, if something’s happened to the Princess…”

Applejack growled. “We should’ve never trusted that two-timin’ varmint,” she said in a low voice. “Discord’s behind this, he has to be. No one else could cause this much chaos.”

Rainbow nodded. “I’ve had it up to here with chaos shenanigans messing with my clouds,” she said, reaching a hoof up to her head for emphasis. “I say we get Discord here and kick his sorry flank all the way to next Tuesday.”

“Not that I disagree,” Rarity cut in, “but how are we to summon him in the first place? The spell that Princess Celestia gave us only works with all six Elements present.”

Applejack tapped a hoof to her chin in thought. “Flutters did say she was gonna ask Discord to look for Twi. Maybe she can get a hold of him?”

“Fluttershy did what?” Rarity exclaimed. “Even after we all told her not to involve that scoundrel?”

“Yep,” Applejack affirmed, popping the p. “After our big ol’ fight last weekend she said she was gonna ask him to find Twilight.”

Rarity sighed. “Well, I suppose that I cannot fault her for taking what must have seemed like the only option at the time.”

“What’re we waiting for?” Rainbow shouted, taking to the air. “Let’s get the rest of the girls and go kick some draconequus tail!”

“Hold on a moment, Dash!” Applejack called, stopping Rainbow midair before she could speed off towards Sugarcube Corner. The farm mare turned to the two foals, who were at this point watching everything around them with wide eyes. “You two need to get someplace safe.”

“Don’t worry about that, Applejack, I can watch them,” Berry’s voice piped up from the doorway. It seemed that she'd been listening in on at least part of the conversation. “You guys go save the world.”

Rainbow and Applejack nodded at her and took off to grab Pinkie. Rarity took a little bit longer to nuzzle Sweetie Belle before following. “Be good for Miss Punch!” she called as she ran off.

There was a loud crash from inside the Barrel, prompting Berry to mutter something under her breath and turn around. “I go outside for ten seconds-” she started shouting, though the two fillies tuned her out rather quickly.

“So, we’re grabbing Scoots and following them, right?” Apple Bloom whispered.

Sweetie frowned, looking around. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea…” she whispered back.

“Well, Ah’m goin’,” Apple Bloom huffed. “Ah’m big enough to help on the farm, so Ah’m big enough to help here!”

Sweetie Belle’s eyes widened as her friend took off. “Apple Bloom!” she hissed, but the other filly was already out of hearing range. Sweetie whimpered a bit, but glanced to make sure that Berry was still turned around before sneaking after Apple Bloom. “We’re gonna get in so much trouble for this…” she muttered.

Starlight really had no idea what to think. After all these years, only now he decided to show up? Now, after she had worked so tirelessly to set up her perfect haven of equality? Now, after he had spent over a decade ignoring her very existence? And he even had the absolute gall to show up with an alicorn–probably a princess. As much as she wanted to scream at Sunburst, she had to tread carefully; one wrong word could see her in prison, if her assumption of the blue alicorn being royalty was correct.

She grit her teeth and forced herself to maintain her smile. “Yep!” she replied, her voice as cheery as she could make it. “Thirteen years. A while indeed. How’ve you been?”

Sunburst adjusted his glasses and fiddled with his goatee a bit. “I’ve been…uh…alright, I suppose. You?”

Starlight waved a hoof back and forth. “Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that, you know how life is.”

From the alicorn’s expression, it seemed like she wasn’t buying her ruse, even if Sunburst looked like he was falling for it wholeheartedly. Luckily, her followers–she mentally coughed–friends were there to back her up.

“Starlight helped us all discover our truest selves!” Double Diamond interjected happily.

Party Favor nodded along. “She showed us just how much better life was without our cutie marks!”

The alicorn raised an eyebrow at that, and Starlight mentally swore. She still wasn’t convinced. “Be that as it may,” she said, “We are not here on a simple visit. This town was, by Our best estimate, founded over three years ago, correct?”

Starlight nodded, her nervousness increasing.

“As this settlement never filed for self-governance, it owes several tens of thousands of bits to the Equestrian government in back taxes.” At both Double Diamond and Party Favor’s cries of protest, the princess raised a hoof. “However,” she said, gritting her teeth a bit, “due to…extenuating circumstances, that may be waived.”

Starlight gulped. “What circumstances?”

“Legally speaking, miss Glimmer,” the alicorn said, peering down at the much smaller unicorn, “you have been dead for over eight years.”

Starlight actually recoiled a bit. “Wh-what?”

Sunburst nodded. “According to Princess Luna-” Starlight filed that name away for later “-your missing ponies case went cold a few months after you ran away, and then you were declared legally deceased not too long after.” He padded at the ground a bit, an anxious tic he’d had even as a foal. “But the princesses need somepony skilled at magic, and I just know that you’re up to the task!”

Starlight tilted her head in confusion. “What, and you going to magic school up in Canterlot wasn’t enough?”

Sunburst cringed. “I’m good at the theory, but I don’t have nearly the power or skill to pull something like what we need off. You were always way better at that than I was.” He perked up a bit after glancing at both the town’s residents present. “Speaking of, how’d you do it? Whatever magic you're using to mess with cutie marks has got to be insane!”

Before Starlight could respond, Double Diamond, ever the hypestallion, interjected. “She uses the Staff of Sameness to remove our cutie marks and stores them in the Vault!”

Well, crap, Starlight thought, struggling to maintain her smile. Time to flex my carefully honed bullshitting skills.

Sunburst once again adjusted his glasses and leaned forward, his earlier apprehension forgotten. “The Staff of Sameness?” he asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of something like that.”

For a brief moment, Starlight’s smile was genuine as she remembered a foalhood long since gone. Back when Sunburst would get all excited over a new spell he found out about or a book he’d started reading. The pair used to spend hours at a time messing about with magic and games before his damned cutie mark got in the way and his parents shipped him off to Canterlot to be like his older sister. With that thought, though, she was snapped back to reality and considered her options. Sunburst would still be easy to fool; she could feed him small bits of information about her spell and he’d never see it coming when she stole his mark. Luna, on the other hoof, was an unknown. Alicorns were dangerous, but if she acted quickly enough, she should be able to rend her mark from her body before she had a chance to retaliate. It would take all the social maneuvering she could manage, but she would worm her way out of this one, she was certain.

“Oh, as far as I could tell, records of the Staff have been mostly lost to time,” Starlight lied, waving her hoof dismissively. “It’s no surprise you haven’t heard of it.” She made sure to keep her smile and focused on Sunburst. “Perhaps you would like to see our Cutie Mark Vault?”

Just as Starlight predicted, Sunburst took the bait hook, line, and sinker; he enthusiastically nodded, ecstatic to see some new magic. She couldn’t quite read the princess’s expression, but Starlight took that as a good sign. Luna wasn’t outright antagonizing her yet, so she still had some grip on the situation. Plus, given that they seemed to want her help with something, she had an extra bargaining chip.

“I, too, would like a look at this ‘Vault,’” Luna eventually said. “I have a certain…knowledge, shall we say, of ancient magical artifacts. I may be able to identify your Staff.”

Starlight gulped a bit. “Of course,” she weakly responded, trying her damnedest not to stutter. That was another hitch in her plan, but she could definitely work around it. She’d built this town up from nothing, after all; her work couldn’t just be all dismantled in a single day! “It’s a few minute’s walk to the cave, but I can lead you there now, if you’d like.”

“That would be preferable, yes,” Luna agreed. “I would like to get this over with as quickly as possible.”

She and Sunburst turned and left the building, presumably to wait outside. Now with just her two most loyal followers in the room, Starlight let out a sigh. “Double Diamond, Party Favor, would you two be dears and gather up the rest of the town?” she asked, her voice low enough that the guests wouldn’t overhear. “We may have some new converts soon!”

Discord was having a great day. Wonderful, even. He’d had the amazing foresight to record the goings-on on Popstar so he could rewatch them whenever he wished, even if he wasn’t there to witness it live! Snapping his paw, he summoned a copy of himself to pat himself on the back for that one, which he dismissed as soon as the deed was done. He’d even moved his window into Void’s favorite universe to his home in Chaosville. Sure, it took some extra finangling with the In-Between’s fabric of unreality and may have inadvertently destabilized an uninhabited universe seven teraparsecs kata such that it would end a few hundred billion years earlier than it would have otherwise, but that was a small price to pay for watching Twiggles get trounced from the comfort of his own home!

He really didn’t envy her. Getting her crap kicked in by a baby god had to hurt, as much as Discord found it terribly amusing.

As he rewound the tape to watch Sparkle get chucked into a mountain again, he threw another clawful of self-summoned jelly beans in his mouth and considered the flavors. Jalapeño, wet socks, avocado toast, salmon, printer ink, C#, charm, orange (the color, that is, not the fruit), and strawberry. A wonderfully chaotic combination.

A knock at his door interrupted his musings and he rolled his eyes. He waved his talon, summoning a remote to turn off the window. “Come in!” he called.

Instead of someone entering through his front door, though, a copy of himself dressed in business casual–though with an askew tie–materialized from his ceiling and ran down his stairs to nowhere. “Sir Discord, sir!” he shouted.

Discord groaned and twisted himself around in his couch without ever actually standing up. “This better be an emergency or you’re fired.”

The intern Discord nodded rapidly. “Fluttershy pressed The Button!” he exclaimed.

The original Discord gasped. “The Button?” he clarified. “The button we told her only to press if it was an absolute emergency? The button I thought she’d never press because she’s too nice to call me even in an emergency? That button?”

“The Button,” his copy affirmed.

Immediately, metal shutters rolled down over all the house’s windows, plunging the building into darkness save for a flashing red light with no discernable source. An alarm started blaring as more copies of Discord–these ones dressed in military garb from various countries and time periods–ran into the main room from numerous hallways that hadn’t existed before. The original Discord donned an officer’s uniform, complete with a bubble pipe, and began pacing back and forth.

“Alright, men,” he said to the chaotic assemblage of Discords, his voice far gruffer than usual, “we’ve been summoned to Fluttershy’s cottage to face an unknown threat.” Dramatically, he pointed to a door that had just materialized next to his front door, overlapping with his shuttered window in a way that shouldn’t be physically possible. Taking a drag from his pipe and exhaling the soapy bubbles, he continued. “We don’t know what’s gonna be on the other side, so we’ve gotta be ready for everything!”

“But sir!” a Discord dressed as a Roman legionnaire shouted. “What sort of entrance will you be making?”

Discord grinned. “I’m glad you asked!” He snapped his tail, summoning a changing screen from outside his peripheral. His shadow rummaged around behind it, tossing a wig, monocle, and single hiking boot out before he stood back up. When he dismissed the screen, he was wearing a pair of swimming trunks and a brightly-colored snorkel. Excitedly, he threw open the door to reveal a bathroom. In nary a moment, he’d flown over to the toilet, opened it, and proudly stood up in it. “Au revoir!”

He reached over and flushed the toilet, spinning him around a few times. At the third rotation, he gave a salute to his gathered copies and, with a descending series of a few notes, spun his way down the drain.

A couple seconds later, he emerged from Fluttershy’s kitchen sink faucet with a burst of confetti. Uncoiling himself from her sink, he loudly and gleefully announced, “I hath arrived!”

His pronouncement was met by silent stares. Fluttershy seemed almost ashamed, hiding a bit behind her mane. Pinkie seemed the most joyful, smiling up at him. The orange one whose name he never bothered to remember (unless it suited him, of course) had her hoof firmly on The Button, which, based on its position and the open drawer, had been extricated from Fluttershy’s possession against her will. Skittles was already in his face and ready to attack him. The final mare–what was her name again? Fairity? Parity? Ah, right, Schmarity! Unfortunate name, that one. Regardless, she was leveling an icy glare at him.

Discord, of course, cared not for what most of these ponies thought of him, so their hatred splashed off as easily as water on polyethylene. Really, he was more affronted at their lack of response in general. He threw off his snorkel and scoffed. “Really?” he incredulously asked. “I go through all that effort to make an entrance and I don’t get any recognition for it?”

A beat passed before Pinkie started enthusiastically applauding, along with Fluttershy weakly and confusedly clapping her forehooves together as she hovered. Discord grinned. At least some ponies appreciated his efforts.

The orange one–ah, right, Jackapple, that was her name–snorted. “Listen, we ain’t here to feed your ego. You’re gonna help us fix whatever mess you caused or it’s back to stone with ya!”

Discord noted at that point that four of the mares, excluding Fluttershy, were wearing their Elements. Of course, it wasn’t like the things could rainbow laser him without all six, but the gems were still powerful conduits for harmony magic. Not that he had any intention of letting them know that. Instead, he rolled his eyes. “Please, as much as I would absolutely love to take credit for whatever crises you’re experiencing, I simply cannot.” He placed a paw over his chest and smiled. “I’m reformed, don’t you remember? So if you’ve used my Emergency Button without this really needing me, I’ll just be going, now.”

“Not so fast, Buster!” he heard Skittles shout as soon as he turned his back. Sighing, Discord split himself in half to allow the irate pegasus to fly right through him and into the opposite wall.

“Discord,” Fluttershy almost whispered as he reformed, but it still caught his attention. “Something’s wrong with the Sun, and there’s invasive black vines everywhere. Ponies are scared and all my animal friends are too frightened to go outside.” She looked up, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, and Discord felt his normal sassy attitude melting. “Can you help?” she asked, and he really couldn’t say no to her.

Besides, to mess with the Sun, one would need immense amounts of power or access to chaos magic and to have already taken out Celly. And the only beings on Equus with that kind of power were dead, locked in Tartarus, ruling the country, himself, or…

Discord finally spared a glance out of Fluttershy’s kitchen window, seeing the veritable sea of plundervines spilling out of the Everfree for the first time. For the briefest of moments, his eyes widened and he actually grimaced. This…might be an actual problem.

Author's Note

So this chapter might have gotten away from me just a bit. Enough that I have to split it into two parts. It should just be one more chapter in Equestria, though, and we'll be back to Popstar (well, it and the surrounding universes) permanently! The plundervines are just far too pressing of an issue to leave on the table without addressing, and this is the perfect opportunity for me to bring in pony commentary.

Also, next chapter should be out quite a bit faster than this one. The last few weeks have been a bit busy for me, between me getting sick again and finals week happening, but now it's winter break, which gives me quite a bit more time to write. Stay tuned for chapter fourteen: In the Absence of Magic!

Chapter XIV: In the Absence of Magic

The walk up to the Cutie Mark Vault was, much to Sunburst’s surprise, not nearly as awkward as he initially feared. It consisted mostly of him pelting Starlight with questions about her magic, her giving shockingly in-depth answers, and Princess Luna following behind them with a constant frown. It almost reminded him of before he got his cutie mark, back when he ate up any information he could about magic, and the happy discussions he’d have with Starlight about it. Despite his flunking out of CSGU, his voracious hunger for knowledge had never faded over the years, and it seemed that Starlight had only gotten more powerful over time. She even seemed to loosen up a bit as she talked about her magic!

Flaring his horn, he fiddled with his glasses a bit as he asked his next question. “So you have to match the natural frequency of the subject’s own magical output?”

Starlight nodded. “Yep! If you don’t match it near perfectly, the waves will destructively interfere before you can actually do anything.”

“Fascinating,” Sunburst said.

Before their conversation could continue, though, it was interrupted by Princess Luna opening her mouth. “How curious,” she noted, peering up at the sky. “‘Twould appear that my sister has yet to lower the Sun.”

Sunburst gulped. “Why…why would that happen?”

Luna shrugged. “Most likely, some pretentious noble or another is distracting her from her duties. I shall wait for her move before I raise the Moon.”

Starlight seemed to be visibly sweating enough that even Sunburst took notice when he looked back. “Starlight? Are you alright?”

“Y-yep,” she shakily answered. “It’s just a bit hot out, y’know? I’ll be fine once we get in the cave.”

Sunburst glanced forward and gaped. “Cave” was putting it a bit lightly. The area Starlight had led them towards was positively cavernous. The group entered without any fanfare, leaving the orange unicorn to glance around with his mouth still open. The cavern itself wasn’t much to write home about; just a standard geological formation. But the interesting thing was at the end: a blue glowing stone tablet. The thing had to be several meters tall and at least three across, but its size wasn’t the impressive part. No, the terrifyingly awesome part of it were the dozens of cutie marks stored within, kept unmoving in a sort of stasis.

Starlight trotted up to the cavern’s centerpiece, a stone pedestal upon which a twisted stick sat. She turned around and beamed. “Here we have the Staff of Sameness! One of the great Mage Meadowbrook’s nine enchanted items!”

Luna frowned, but Sunburst didn’t notice, too transfixed on the Vault. “H-how is this even possible?” Sunburst questioned. “The amount of potential energy stored in only a few marks alone should be enough to overwhelm the rock’s chemical binding energy!”

Starlight telekinetically picked up the Staff and twirled it around a bit. “Like I said earlier, it’s all wave mechanics.” Her beam turned into a predatory grin. “But you won’t need to worry about that much longer. Diamond! Favor! Block the exit!”

Sunburst whirled around to see what had to have been most of the town move into the cavern, stopping anypony from leaving unless they could teleport. Beginning to hyperventilate, he turned back towards Starlight and his eyes widened. For from betwixt the fork-shaped Staff’s prongs sprang a cyan laser, its trajectory aimed directly at him. Slamming his eyes shut, he braced for impact.

None came.

Cautiously opening his eyes, he found himself surrounded by a soft blue shield, clearly summoned by his alicorn companion. Luna smiled down at him while still keeping Starlight in her vision. “Be aware, Sunburst,” she stated. “Never take your eyes off an opponent.”

Starlight growled and shifted her attention to the princess. Without speaking, she changed her target and gathered power in the Staff once again. Luna just rolled her eyes and cleared her throat.

“ENOUGH!” she shouted with the Royal Canterlot Voice, stopping Starlight’s magic in its tracks and blasting her backwards onto her rump. The Staff of Sameness was wrenched from her grasp, clattering to the floor. The cavern even shook, and a part of the ceiling cracked a bit.

Nopony noticed a bit of blue gas make its way out of the crack.

Luna strode forward. “You, Starlight Glimmer, have blundered. I knew both Mage Meadowbrooks personally, and between the original and her namesake, they only had eight enchanted items.” Her next step brought her hoof directly down on the Staff, shattering it like the stick it was. “Moreover, the removal of a cutie mark would prevent a pony from properly utilizing their talents, as their internal magic would backfire on them.” The princess smiled and flared her horn, sending a cleaning spell Starlight’s way. A series of gasps ran out from the gathered townsfolk as the unicorn’s makeup was torn away, revealing her very much marked flank. “Ergo,” Luna finished, “you must still have yours.”

Double Diamond stepped forward from the crowd. “You…you lied to us?” he asked with tears in his eyes.

Starlight backed up until her tail was brushing up against the Vault. “No!” she cried. “You don’t understand! There was no other way!”

“You told us that cutie marks led to nothing but pain and strife!” Party Favor called, his voice sounding pained. “If you were lying about taking your own, what else could you have been lying about?”

“Did you just want power?” a pegasus mare shouted out from the crowd. “Is that it?”

“You can’t have it both ways, Starlight!” a unicorn mare added. “Equality means all of us!”

More jeering from the townsfolk followed, and Starlight grew visibly more distressed with each comment. Eventually, Luna stood tall and spread her wings. “Starlight Glimmer,” she bellowed, “you stand in contempt of the Crown for years of tax evasion, foalnapping, extortion, assault, and battery. Have you any defense?”

Starlight slowly looked up, her mane shading her eyes and, surprisingly, a smile on her face. “Oh, but Princess, you said it yourself,” she chuckled. “You can’t try a dead mare.”

Before Luna could react, Starlight had teleported next to Sunburst, charged her horn, and his next few moments were pure pain. The demarking was not a pleasant process in any sense of the word, as a piece of his very soul was rent from his body and unceremoniously chucked in the Vault with the others. With a groan, he weakly collapsed to the cavern’s floor as his coat desaturated and his cutie mark was replaced by an equal sign.

Starlight next turned to Luna, but the princess had already taken to the air and was between Starlight and the exit. The princess flared her horn and seemed to be preparing something, but much to her shock, the spell fizzled out. “Wh-what?” she breathed.

Unbeknownst to her, she’d flown directly next to where the cavern had cracked earlier, where a gaseous, light blue substance was spilling outward and targeting her horn. For a brief moment, everypony was silent in their confusion.

And then the crack exploded as a vine erupted from the ceiling and wrapped around Luna’s right hind leg. Another burst from the floor and wrapped around her middle, completely immobilizing her. The princess struggled helplessly against the plants, her magic disabled and her wings bound as the townsfolk screamed and began retreating from the cavern.

Starlight wasn’t one to miss out on an opportunity like this. With only a moment to contemplate what was going on, she fired her cutie demarking spell at the prone royal. The plants actually seemed to hiss and draw back a bit as the spell connected, but stayed firm enough that Luna couldn’t escape. She still fought back with all her might, though, her cutie mark seemingly far more difficult to remove than Sunburst’s. Even as she wrothe in agony, Luna was able to grit her teeth and glare down at Starlight.

“This is treason!” she shouted. “You will answer for your crimes!”

“I think I’ve already won, Princess,” Starlight calmly stated, Luna’s cutie mark finally detaching from her body and joining the others in the Vault. Too weakened to fight back any further and with the spell over, the vines grabbed hold of the alicorn once more. In an instant, the one holding Luna retreated, dragging her down and into the ground. Moments later, more vines spilled out of the cracks in the wall, completely blocking the two unicorns left in the cavern from the exit.

The cavern’s shaking finally ceased as the vines stopped growing, leaving Sunburst and Starlight in silence with nothing but a broken stick and glowing rock.

“So you do have somethin’ to do with this!” Applejack exclaimed, pointing an accusatory hoof at Discord.

Discord dismissively waved a talon. “Oh please, I merely planted the seeds for this over a thousand years ago! Hardly anything, really.”

Everypony glared at him.

Rolling his eyes, Discord reached out of Fluttershy’s window and plucked a sprout from the ground. “Besides, these plundervines should’ve sprouted centuries ago! I thought they’d already been dealt with.”

“Well if you made them,” Rarity growled, “you can unmake them!”

Discord snapped a bite of the vine off and chewed thoughtfully. “No can do,” he said. “These things are chaos constructs; destroying these would involve channeling-” he made a face “-order magic. Why, if I got rid of the problem entirely…” he snapped his fingers, vanishing the sprig and collapsing to the ground, though a transparent ghost-like facsimile of him remained in the air. “...it might just kill me!” he finished.

“That’s not entirely disagreeable,” Rarity muttered as Discord returned to his body. Fluttershy actually shot her a glare over that one.

With a softer stare, the yellow pegasus looked back at Discord. “Is there some way we could get rid of the vines, then?”

Discord stroked his goatee and paced around. “Yes, that might just do.” Reaching up into nowhere, he pulled down a projector screen, which lit up without a projector. With a snap of his tail, Fluttershy’s kitchen was rearranged into a classroom, albeit one with every type of chair imaginable, and Discord was suddenly dressed in a tweed jacket and bowtie. “Take your seats, everypony!” the draconequus called, pulling out a pointer as the screen lit up with the words “Intro to Magical Harmonics: Chaos and Order”. “I, Professor D. Cord, shall be your expositor this evening!”

Pinkie enthusiastically bounced into a nearby couch, and Fluttershy tentatively took a seat on the beanbag next to her. It was the softest thing she’d sat on in her life, even more than clouds.

The other three, of course, remained standing (or flying, in Rainbow’s case). Discord just shrugged. “Eh, can’t please ‘em all.” With a flourish of his lion paw, he produced a device that he clicked a button on, changing the slide on screen. Now it displayed an image of Discord uproariously laughing upon his antlered throne, pink and blue patchwork grass in the background and cotton candy clouds littering the sky. In his paw he held a bag of seeds that he was happily tossing into his mouth. Discord sighed. “Ah, the memories.”

“Get to the point, Discord,” an annoyed Applejack snapped.

“Good things come to those who wait!” Discord parroted the old adage. Clearing his throat, he continued. “Now, as you may be aware, I was the uncontested ruler of Equestria for many a moon one thousand years ago-”

“We’re aware,” Rainbow sighed.

Discord exhaled and some steam escaped from his ears. “The more you interrupt me the slower I’ll go.”

Everypony fell silent, and the room’s only audio became the chatter of Fluttershy’s animal friends from behind her kitchen door.

“Now, as I was saying,” Discord said with a sneer, “I had a backup plan, should those annoying little ponies find a way to stop my gloriously chaotic reign! I created these wonderful little chaos packets called plunderseeds.” He flicked the slide again, now showing an image of the seeds burrowing under a tree-like crystal that Fluttershy had never seen before. “They’d grow and grow, and eventually they’d seek out sources of harmony and order magic and strangle them! In the ensuing chaos, nopony would be able to stop me from breaking free!” He looked at the screen and stroked his goatee. “Though, I suppose that the Tree of Harmony must have been more powerful than I thought if it was able to hold them back for so long.”

Pinkie raised her hoof, and Discord nodded to her. “What’s the Tree of Harmony?” she asked.

Discord blinked. “Sometimes I forget just how little Celly tells you ponies,” he noted. “The Tree of Harmony is the source of the Elements of Harmony–they’re sort of like its fruits.” For emphasis, he summoned an apple and took a bite out of it.

“The Elements grew from a tree?” Rainbow asked incredulously.

“Yes,” Discord responded, blunt as ever. He tossed the apple into the air, where it twirled around and became a diorama of the Everfree Forest. Catching the structure, Discord snapped his paw to conjure a model of the Tree, which he placed in the Forest’s center. “And also no. The Tree is not exactly alive in the traditional sense. It’s more a massive conduit for harmony magic, so both it and the Elements can power each other.” With a wave of his paw, streamers of light appeared over the model trees and snaked towards the crystal tree before exploding up and outward like a firework. “It draws harmony magic from around it and redisperses it across the planet, letting the natural chaos of the Everfree express itself, but keeping a firm boundary between it and the rest of the universe.”

“Well that’s gotta be a load of hooey!” Applejack protested. “There ain’t no way somethin’ that made the Elements also made the Everfree!”

Discord grinned. “Oh, but it did. The magic wants to flow and equalize, but the Tree pumps it away from the Forest and into Equestria, keeping the concentration high everywhere else!” He snapped the diorama into nonexistence. “Ever wonder why the Everfree Forest’s range of influence forms a near-perfect sphere? This is why.”

Everypony was stunned into silence.

Discord snapped his tail and advanced the slide further. Now, the burrowed seeds had sprouted and wrapped around the Tree. “Now, without the Tree of Harmony, the harmony magic of Equestria would flow back into the Everfree and the Forest would expand in turn, causing lower magic levels overall for you ponies. And ever since Celly and Lulu took the Elements to seal my beautiful visage in stone, the Tree has been steadily losing power.”

“So if the Tree got its power back,” Fluttershy realized, “it could fight back the vines and save Equestria!”

“Ding ding ding, we have a winner!” Discord shouted, confetti raining down around Fluttershy and a gold medal appearing around her neck. Blushing at the sudden attention, she sank down further into her beanbag as Discord continued. “A sudden influx of harmony magic would empower the Tree enough that it could interfere with the all the plundervines’ magic at once, destroying them!”

Rarity frowned. “But how are we to restore power to such an entity?”

“What if we gave it the Elements back?” Pinkie chirped.

Applejack and Rainbow physically recoiled at the idea. “Give up the Elements?” Rainbow scoffed and pointed at Discord. “They’re the only thing keeping him in line!”

Fluttershy frowned. “No they’re not,” she whispered, but it was still enough to focus everypony’s attention on her. She whimpered and sank even further into the beanbag.

“No, darling, please continue,” Rarity said.

“It’s just,” Fluttershy said, “if Discord wanted to take over Equestria ever since Twilight disappeared, he could’ve.” She gave the draconequus a soft smile. “He values our friendship more than that, now.”

“Of course, my dear!” Discord dramatically declared. “We’re still on for tea on Tuesday, right?”

Fluttershy nodded. “Same time as usual!”

Rarity cleared her throat. “Well now, even assuming that we do return the Elements to this Tree, how are we even to know that they would work without Twilight’s?”

“Oh, you five are the best of friends even without Books McGee,” Discord dismissed. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out on the way.”

“On the way?” Rainbow shouted. “How about you just teleport us right there, right now, Mr. So-Powerful-I-Can-Move-The-Sun.”

Discord gasped and placed his talon over this chest. “And deny you a perfectly good adventure on which you can learn a valuable lesson about friendship? Why, I could never!” Yanking down the projector screen, he rolled it back up into Fluttershy’s ceiling. “Besides, I am certain that Harmony still hates my guts. She would never let me get so close to something of Hers when this whole debacle is because of my seeds.”

Pinkie tilted her head. “Who’s Harmo-”

“Aaaaand would you look at the time!” Discord interrupted, pulling back the fur on his paw to check a watch. “I’ve gone completely over my allotted time slot! We need to get a move on!”

With a snap of his talon, he and the mares vanished from Fluttershy’s cottage and appeared on the path directly outside of the Everfree. It was the exact same spot that, only a year ago, six mares had ventured inside to save the world from eternal night. The Elements they had gathered back then now hung around their necks, but the air of tension was still decidedly there.

The numerous plundervines made for a far more ominous picture, which was impressive, given the Everfree’s already notorious reputation. Fluttershy openly shivered in fright. The Forest already played host to a number of dangerous creatures, which she knew had to have been aggravated even further due to the vines.

Discord, it seemed though, was unperturbed. Wearing a khaki jacket and shorts, pith helmet, and an oversized hiking backpack, he strode forward into the murky depths. “Onward, my friends! Let us venture forth into the unknown!”

“The Everfree Forest ain’t exactly ‘unknown,’ Discord,” Applejack sighed as she entered as well, the other four mares following closely behind. “We’ve been in here before.”

“Ah, but not in this state,” Discord countered. “Who knows what dangers abound while such an upheaval takes place!”

Fluttershy squeaked and fell back so that she was behind Pinkie. Of course, such a thing would’ve been fruitless even had they been under attack; the tree line was quite a ways behind them at this point. The vines were so thick there was barely any space to stand, and it was quickly going dark. The evening sun, even stalled in the sky as it was, was not enough to illuminate through a canopy covered with the vines.

“Rarity?” Pinkie asked as she stopped pronking in the low visibility. “Could you do something magicky to get some light?”

Rarity tried to flare her horn, but was immediately coated in a blue gas of some sort. The spell fizzled out as she started violently coughing until the gas diffused. Taking a deep breath, the mare answered flatly, “It would seem not.”

A snap reverberated around them, and quite suddenly Discord was glowing. “Oh, my dear, if it’s light you want, then let there be light!” Conjuring a mirror, he frowned a bit. “It needs a bit more…I’ve got it!” A light bulb appeared over his head, which he covered with a lampshade he pulled out of the ground and hung from his horns. As a finisher, he summoned a miniature lamp stand shaped like himself to complete the look. He kept the entire structure on top of his head and replaced his hat with it, of course.

The glow intensified to the point that, with Discord as the illumination point, they could actually make out their surroundings. They were surrounded on all sides by a shifting, roiling mass of vines, and directly in front of them stood an impassable wall of them. Applejack leveled a glare at Discord. “Alright, you’re the one who knows where we’re goin’.”

Discord leaned forward and knocked on the wall of vines. When they failed to retreat, he shrugged. “Well, the Tree is in the chasm next to Celly’s old castle, but the way forward is directly through these plundervines, which certainly puts us in a bit of a jam.” He summoned a jar of strawberry jam and a piece of toast to go with his statement.

Pinkie giggled. At everypony’s befuddled stares, she tilted her head in confusion. “What? I can appreciate a good visual gag.”

“I am afraid that was far from my best,” Discord said, reaching up and plucking a banana from a vine that bent down to meet him. “Rather low hanging fruit, I must say.”

Pinkie grinned. “I still found that one a-peel-ing!”

Rainbow groaned. “Now’s really not the time, Pinkie!”

Pinkie frowned up at her friend. “Dashie, we’ve all been super tense lately!” Switching to a smile, she continued, “So why not destress with a good laugh!”

“Well said, my comedic comrade!” Discord complimented.

Applejack grumbled. “Ah don’t think laughin’ is gonna get us outta this mess, though.”

“With all due respect, Applejack,” Rarity piped up, “it just might.” She softly smiled at the pink mare. “After all, where would we be if not for Pinkie’s ability to laugh in the face of adversity?”

“Yep!” Pinkie excitedly agreed. “Keeping the mood light is my thing! Laughter’s serious business, you know!”

Fluttershy gasping drew everypony’s attention. “Pinkie, look! Your Element!”

Indeed, the Element of Laughter was glowing a soft blue around Pinkie’s neck. She looked down at it curiously. “Huh. That’s neat.”

Discord stepped aside and gestured to the vines blocking their path. “Lead the way, Miss Pie.”

Pinkie resumed her pronking, and the wall fell apart as she approached, the vines withering away and falling back into the underbrush. Tentatively, the group continued forward, unknowingly followed by a curious group of fillies that snuck through after them. “So that’s it, then?” Rainbow asked. “We just get Pinkie laughing every time there’s an issue and it solves it?”

Pinkie tapped her Element, which had stopped glowing and, in fact, had dulled a bit. “I don’t think it’ll work more than once.”

Rainbow let out an exasperated groan, but said nothing more. The group wound up walking forward in silence for several more minutes before they stumbled across their next obstacle: a small pond and another wall of vines on the other side of it. The plundervines off to either side were too thick to get through, and cut through the water in such a way that going around the pond wasn’t an option. Instead, for those without wings, the only way across was to hop upon a series of stones popping out of the water. Pinkie and Applejack made it across without any issues, and Rarity followed with only a single complaint about the messiness of it. Fluttershy, though, elected to hop across as well, given her poor flying skills and the stress of the situation.

She regretted that decision when the rock she was on started moving.

Fluttershy let out a shriek as a cragadile emerged from the water and roared at her friends. On instinct, she clung to its back, wrapping her forelegs around its rocky scales. She kept her eyes shut tight, but heard Rarity’s scream loud and clear.

“Get out of here!” Discord shouted, prompting Fluttershy to crack her eyes open. He rushed forward to try and grab her off of the rampaging creature, but the cragadile, unfortunately, had other ideas. It moved quickly enough to slam its powerful tail directly into Discord’s chest, sending him flying fast enough to slam directly through the thick wall of vines.

“Discord!” Fluttershy shouted, but he had already vanished behind the wall of foliage, which was quickly closing as the vines moved back into position. Their only source of light was left tumbling through the air, but the Discord-shaped lamp thankfully landed squarely on Fluttershy’s back, miraculously staying balanced even as the cragadile turned back towards the other mares.

It snapped out at them, but Pinkie was able to stomp on its closed mouth before it could open it again, keeping it shut. Grunting, Applejack yanked a section of vine from the wall. “Dash, get out of here and get help!” she shouted.

“What?” Rainbow demanded in shock as Applejack ducked under the cragadile’s front legs, tying them together with the vine trailing behind her.

“Yer the fastest of us!” Applejack grunted. “And this ain’t gonna hold a cragadile for long!”

“Uh, girls?” Pinkie piped up, trembling a bit. “I don’t think I can keep it dow-”

The cragadile’s mouth launched back open, sending Pinkie flying with a “Wheeee!” It turned back towards Rarity and tried to roar again, but a solid kick from Rainbow interrupted it.

“No way I’m leaving you guys alone to deal with this thing!” she shouted, the Element of Loyalty beginning to glow red slightly.

Fluttershy, of course, was still clinging to the cragadile’s back for dear life.

“Yes, that’s all well and good,” Rarity said, “but how are we dealing with the cragadile that’s currently trying to eat us?”

The vine that Applejack had tied around it chose that exact moment to snap.

For another time, the cragadile tried to roar at its prey, but it was once again silenced as a snap sounded throughout the area. The only sound it was able to make was the squeaking of a dog toy.

A segment of vines split as a talon forced its way through. Next to it, a lion’s paw emerged from the foliage and, with a herculean effort, wrenched open a gap to reveal a snarling Discord. “You,” he growled at the cragadile, “have overstayed your welcome.”

His tail whipped around and, with the same sound as a crack of a whip, the cragadile simply vanished. Fluttershy found herself rather surprised and hovering in the air without even flapping her wings, before Discord floated her gently to the ground, picked up the lamp, and secured it back on his head.

“Wh-where did you send it?” Fluttershy shakily asked.

“Someplace it will be a bit more useful,” Discord answered.

A few thousand kilometers to the south, a very confused cragadile found itself suddenly on a stormy island. It had no way of comprehending why it was there or why there was a purple unicorn with a broken horn ordering a bunch of yeti to attack it, just that it was very, very angry.

“Don’t worry, though,” Discord reassured as Pinkie rejoined them, “I am certain that it will be perfectly fine. Now, Miss Dash,” he gestured to the path-blocking vines, “would you do the honors?”

Rainbow darted forward with her glowing Element, felling the wall of vines and revealing, finally, sunshine. The group happily moved through, not noticing a certain trio of fillies trailing behind them.

The sunshine, it seemed, was due to the Everfree’s local river. The vines were unable to get a foothold in and around the water, opening up the area to the outside air. The opposite bank, though, was absolutely covered in plundervines. A solid wall of them reached in either direction as far as the eye could see, and the Sun, of course, was still locked in the same position.

“Discord?” Fluttershy gulped. “When you said that the plundervines go after sources of harmony magic…”

“That includes Celly and Lulu, yes,” Discord confirmed. He dismissively waved his talon, though. “Don’t worry about that; once we restore power to the Tree it will release them right as rain!”

“I um, just wanted to point out that it’s nearly ten in the evening,” Fluttershy meekly added. “Could you maybe take care of moving the Sun?”

Discord rolled his eyes, but still snapped his fingers. The Sun quickly fell below the horizon as day turned to night, the full moon rising to its apex. The lunar body still provided enough light to see by, thankfully.

Seeing, though, wasn’t quite necessary to know what was going on. “Oh, goodness me!” cried out a high male voice.

Rarity blinked. “Why, I do believe I recognize that voice!” Trotting downstream, she led the group as a large purple river serpent came into view. “Good evening, good sir!”

The serpent gasped. “Why, if it isn’t the little ponies that helped me out so long ago!” He placed a hand over his chest dramatically. “Perhaps we are predestined to meet each other during fashion emergencies!”

Rainbow loudly groaned, but Pinkie and Applejack quieted her down while Rarity frowned upwards. “Well, I must say that your lovely mustache has grown back wonderfully! What seems to be the issue today?”

The serpent stroked his facial hair and leaned down. “Well you see, Miss…I’m sorry but I can’t seem to recall your name at the moment.”

“Rarity, darling,” Rarity answered. “And I don’t believe I ever had the privilege to learn yours, either.”

“I’m Stephen Magnet,” the serpent introduced himself, “the Everfree’s local river serpent!” He cleared his throat and continued. “Now you see, I was just having my usual personal soirée upstream, when these terribly tacky vines all burst from the ground and got in my beautiful mane!” He leaned down to present the ruined hairdo. “It’s simply horrid!”

Rarity tapped her chin and considered the situation. “Well, if those same vines weren’t entirely disabling my magic, I would be glad to assist you.” She sighed. “But alas, I am no mane stylist, so I fear that working with my hooves directly may only worsen your situation.”

Stephen sighed disappointedly. “Is there truly nothing you can do?”

Rarity hummed in thought. “Well, there is one thing.” She pointed downstream. “If you continue down the river, you’ll eventually reach the town of Ponyville. The local spa is an absolute gem. Just tell them that Rarity sent you, and that they can put it on my tab.” She winked as the Element of Generosity began to glow. “Be sure to add a 30% tip, too.”

Stephen gasped in delight. “Thank you, Miss Rarity! I’ll be sure to go as soon as I can!” He blinked. “Er…when do they open?”

Rarity smiled. “Assuming our celestial cycle resumes as intended, I do believe that Aloe and Lotus will open up shop at eight in the morning.”

“I’ll be there precisely at eight fifteen, then!” Steven confidently declared. “Is there anything, anything at all I can do for you in return?”

Rarity shook her head while maintaining her smile. “Resolving your crinal emergencies is a reward all its own, darling! Though,” she added, “if you would be so kind as to ferry us across the river, that would be appreciated!”

“Oh of course!” Stephen replied, stretching himself out to allow the non-fliers safe passage. “It’s my pleasure.”

Once everypony was across, Rarity happily trotted up to the vines, withering them away and revealing the path forward. “And that is how it is done, darlings.”

Stephen smiled to himself as they disappeared back into the forest. He would have to remember the Ponyville spa for later reference, given how highly Rarity praised it. Before he could return to the river fully, though, a squeaking voice caught his attention.

“Um, excuse us, Mr. Magnet, sir?”

Stephen blinked and looked down at a trio of small fillies. The unicorn–who looked quite similar to Rarity, actually. Perhaps she was a relative. Regardless, she was the one that spoke. “Could we cross too?”

“He called my vines tacky?” Discord grumbled as they trudged ever closer to the Castle of the Two Sisters.

“Well, they aren’t exactly aesthetically pleasing,” Rarity countered.

Discord pouted, but said nothing. The group walked in silence for a few moments.

“So…” Pinkie broke it, calling all attention to her. “That’s three of five down. Two to go, right?”

“Pinkie, what are you talking about?” Rainbow asked.

“Oh, just that the Forest seems to be giving us everything we need to express our Elements!” Pinkie said. “So it’s just Flutters and AJ left!”

“Pinkie Pie,” Rarity said, “there has been nothing to assert that that is necessarily the case.”

Pinkie tilted her head. “Well, what about the fact that it’s the same as when we went through to fight Nightmare Moon? I mean, you helped Stephen then, and there was also a manticore, like how there’s one in front of us right now!”

Everypony’s attention snapped right back to the path in front of them, eyes wide at the fact that yes, there was a manticore blocking their path. They all stalled in place except for Fluttershy, who gasped and ran forward.

Everypony called her name in surprise and Discord even raised his paw for a snap, but they were all stopped as the manticore responded completely non-aggressively. “You’re the manticore I helped last summer, right?” Fluttershy asked with a smile.

The manticore let out a purr and nodded before enveloping Fluttershy in a big, furry hug.

Softly, she petted its mane. “How have you been?”

The manticore released her and started making various gestures, along with low rumbling sounds that weren’t quite full roars. Fluttershy nodded along in full comprehension before she gasped. “Oh no!”

“What’s wrong, Flutters?” Pinkie asked.

Fluttershy turned around. “The plundervines injured this manticore’s cubs! We have to help them!” She turned back to the animal. “Lead the way!”

The manticore nodded and took off with Fluttershy close behind. The rest of the group made haste as well, and soon enough they had reached a small den. Even here, the vines shifted around the cave, but they could still clearly hear the whimpers of the cubs inside. Fluttershy leaned down and softly called out, “Come on out, little cubs. I’m here to help you.”

Two small kitten-like manticores plodded out of the den, curiously looking around at everything and periodically glancing at their parent for reassurance. Getting a closer look at their injuries, Fluttershy frowned. They weren’t terribly serious, just a scrape on one and a cut on the other, but that could still be a problem in the wild.

“Oh you poor, poor little babies,” she cooed. “Discord, could you be a dear and get me some rubbing alcohol and a cotton ball?”

Discord yawned. “Are you sur-”

“Yes I’m sure,” Fluttershy said, her voice suddenly quite a bit colder than usual. “I tolerate a lot of joking from you, mister, but this is serious.”

Discord leaned back in surprise. “Yes’m.” He snapped his fingers and summoned a bottle of the disinfectant and the desired cotton ball.

Fluttershy smiled. “Thank you.” Soaking the ball in alcohol, she turned back to the cubs. “Now, this is going to sting, but it’ll make sure those scrapes don’t get infected, okay?”

Both of the cubs nodded, and Fluttershy set about tending to their injuries. Both hissed as their abrasions were disinfected, but the pegasus was undeterred. All the while, the Element of Kindness glowed a soft pink. Soon enough, she was done, and Discord vanished the tools back into nonexistence as the cubs retreated back into the den. She grinned back up at the adult manticore. “They should be alright now. If either of them gets sick, come see me at the edge of the Forest. Just know that you’re not allowed to hunt on my property, alright?”

The manticore grumbled a bit, but nodded and followed its cubs into their den. “Now, Discord,” Fluttershy said, “which way do we go?”

“Well, by my best calculations,” Discord said, summoning a comically oversized map. “The Castle, and by extension the Tree, should be just a few hundred more meters…” he twisted his arm in every direction before settling on one, “...that way.”

They continued down the designated path for a few minutes longer before they found a new wall of vines that crumbled under Kindness’s glow. As the wall fell and the Element’s glow faded, however, the group found, to their collective dismay, another floral structure just beyond it. This, though, was far larger: a massive dome covering the entire Castle of the Two Sisters, including the chasm around it. Clearly, only one option remained.

“Now,” Discord wondered aloud, “how shall we have Applejack demonstrate her honest nature? Is there anything you’ve been keeping from us?”

Applejack sighed. “Nothin’ that’d help us out here. Y’all know Ah already tell y’all most everythin’.”

“Well then,” Discord said, his tone a bit mocking, “ain’t that an issue.”

Before anypony could propose a proper solution, though, a shrill scream from behind them caught everypony’s attention. The group all whirled around and gasped in shock, for before them were three little fillies clustered together, desperately trying to avoid the stare of a cockatrice.

“It’s one of those chicken snake thingies!” Scootaloo shouted.

“Cockatrice,” Sweetie provided.

“Do I sound like I care about what it’s called?” the pegasus retorted.

“Keep your eyes shut, girls!” Apple Bloom called as she stumbled around blindly.

All of the mares barring Fluttershy rushed forward in an attempt to save the Crusaders, but the yellow pegasus had a different plan. “Discord?” she asked.

Discord rolled up his sleeves and sneered at the cockatrice. “On it.”

In an instant, before the others had even reached the Crusaders, the draconequus had rushed forward and pinned the creature against a tree. Unaffected by the cockatrice’s petrifying stare, he glared directly into its eyes. “Now listen here, you oversized lizard, I never liked your kind’s hunting strategies.” He shook his head and tutted. “Turning a creature to stone and slowly feeding off its draining magic just feels immoral, even to me! I have no idea what Grogar was thinking when he designed you, but I digress,” Discord continued. “Here is what you are going to do: you will stop pursuing these foals, you will tell all your cockatrice friends that ponies are off the menu, and if I ever catch you attacking another sapient creature again,” his voice dropped several octaves, “there will be hell to pay.”

He dropped the cockatrice, letting it cluck a few times and scamper off back into the Forest. Standing back up to his full height, Discord dusted off his front appendages and turned back to the group. “Sorry about that. Turning another creature to stone just rubs me the wrong way.”

Scootaloo seemed to be vibrating in excitement. “That. Was. AWESOME!”

Discord preened. “I am amazing, I know.”

“Well, now that that is resolved,” Rarity said, turning to the Crusaders, “what in Celestia’s name are you doing here? We told you to stay at the Barrel!”

“We wanna help!” Apple Bloom declared.

Applejack and Rarity looked at each other, silently deliberated for a few moments, and looked back. “You’re grounded,” they said simultaneously.

Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle both shrank back at that, but Scootaloo grinned. “Hah, you can’t ground me!”

Rainbow descended from where she was hovering so that she was just above Scootaloo. “Not cool, Squirt.”

Rarity raised an eyebrow and added her own two bits. “Your aunts will be hearing about this, Scootaloo. You are far from ‘off the hook,’ as they say.”

“Now, Apple Bloom,” Applejack said, leveling a stare at her sister, “what’s the real reason you’re out here?”

“Ah said it already!” Apple Bloom protested. “Ah wanna help!”

Applejack raised an eyebrow as well. “You and Ah both know that ain’t it.”

Apple Bloom poked at the ground a bit and looked down. “Alright, fine. Ah wanted in on savin’ the world. You always get to do it, so why can’t Ah help sometimes?”

Applejack wrapped her sister into a hug. “C’mon, now, ya don’t need to save the world to help me, and ya definitely didn’t need to bring your lil’ friends into it too. Thank ya for bein’ honest, though.” She ruffled the top of Apple Bloom’s head. “But you’re still grounded.”

Apple Bloom pouted, but Applejack grinned as she looked down and noticed that the Element of Honesty was glowing. Getting up, she trotted towards the dome of vines. “To answer your question, Discord, there’s a neat thing about honesty,” she said. “Bein’ honest can get others to be honest too.”

The vines fell away just enough for all of them to fit through the opening. Applejack happily led the way inside, everypony else following closely behind into the pitch-black darkness underneath the dome.

Starlight had lost count of how many times she'd thrown herself against the wall of vines blocking their exit. She had tried to teleport at first, but any attempt at that had that same blue gas attack her and disable her magic. Her telekinesis, at least, was unaffected, but the vines were too thick for her to be able to part with the fragments of her false Staff.

“It’s not going to work, Starlight,” she heard Sunburst pipe up. He’d managed to stand up, at least, but his gaze seemed almost soulless. “We’re stuck here.”

Sunburst’s actions without his mark were, if Starlight was being truthful with herself, somewhat disturbing. Everypony up until now had willingly surrendered their cutie marks, so seeing somepony so despondent after losing it was new. “What if,” Starlight said, “I set it on fire?”

“We’d probably suffocate.”

Starlight sat down. “So what, it’s hopeless, then? We’re just stuck in this cave until we starve?”

“Not necessarily,” Sunburst started. He reached up to adjust his glasses like he normally did, but his hoof stopped in midair as another part of the demarking spell took effect. “I…I can’t remember what I was going to say.” Panicked, he looked around and began to hyperventilate. “Why can’t I remember? I know I know the theory behind magic, so why can’t I remember?”

Starlight’s right eye twitched. “Oh, so now that you’re brought down to the same level as the rest of us, you’re freaking out? Well sorry to say it, but you’re not a bigwig up in Canterlot anymore!”

“What is your problem, Starlight?” Sunburst asked, a bit angrily. “You were never this mad at the world back in Sire's Hollow!”

“My problem?” Starlight growled. “I’ll tell you my problem. It’s these damned cutie marks, that’s what! They took Mom away, they took you away, and,” she stomped the ground, “nothing good can come of them!”

“I don’t follow,” Sunburst said with a raised eyebrow.

“Mom never cared about me and Dad,” Starlight spat. “She always said her cutie mark was meant for greatness, not wasting away in a town in the middle of nowhere. She got a gig in Las Pegasus when I was three and never came back. And you…” she pointed an accusatory hoof at Sunburst. “As soon as you got your precious cutie mark, you went up to Canterlot to be just like your sister. Guess you were too proud to bother even writing a letter to your small-town friend.” She snorted. “Cutie marks have brought me nothing but pain. They all need to go.”

Sunburst cringed. “Listen, Starlight, yeah, for the first couple years of school, I was too caught up in the hype to think about writing back home.”

“And then what?” Starlight interrupted with a sneer. “You were too pretentious after that to think about contacting an old friend?”

“I was too ashamed to!” Sunburst responded, and Starlight drew back in surprise. He sat back down and lowered his voice to nearly a whisper. “I…I flunked out of CSGU. I just couldn’t show my face to anyone back home after failing everypony like that. I’m sorry.”

Starlight felt like her worldview was on the precipice of shattering. She had built up this image of Sunburst in her mind of a wildly successful wizard that sneered at the very thought of contacting his hometown. But this Sunburst–the real Sunburst–was pretty much the exact opposite. This situation simply did not seem to compute for her.

“Still,” Starlight snarled, “it doesn’t change the fact that cutie marks are what took you and my mom away in the first place! They’re still evil!”

Sunburst leveled a flat look at her. “Starlight, quite frankly, it sounds like your mother was a horrible mare regardless of what her cutie mark was. And overall, they still help ponies!” He made a sweeping gesture. “Our marks are an expression of our true selves, and the aid in ponies’ specializations!” He frowned. “Starlight, your idea of taking everypony’s marks…it’s just not sustainable.”

Starlight started breathing hard. “No, no there’s no way.” She started muttering, mostly to herself. “That can’t be true. It just can’t!”

Sunburst stood and glanced back at his mark in the Vault. “Here, Starlight, I’ll show you. If you give me my mark back, I can use my knowledge of magical theory to help get us out of here.”

Starlight didn’t respond, instead remaining right where she was and continuing to mutter to herself unintelligibly. Sunburst sighed and moved forward. Starlight, so wrapped up as she was in her thoughts, didn’t even see it coming when he hugged her. She certainly felt the embrace, though, and it completely stalled out her brain. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, and, somewhat involuntarily, she began to cry into his shoulder.

Sunburst patted her back, and the two remained like that for several minutes. Eventually, though, a sniffling Starlight separated from the embrace. “Better?” Sunburst asked.

“Everything I’ve worked towards was based on me lying to myself,” Starlight said. “I think I’m about as good as I can be after learning that, but hey, I got the shock out of my system now.”

Sunburst nodded. “Did you uh, actually hear what I said before you started crying?”

Starlight blinked. “Oh, right.” She lit her horn and opened the section of the Vault containing Sunburst’s mark. She looked upon the mark reuniting with him forlornly, but just sighed and let it be.

Sunburst smiled contentedly at the feeling and looked back at the wall of vines, which had actually recoiled a bit when his mark was returned. “I’m going to be a bit blunt here, Starlight,” he said, “but I think we have to release the rest of them, too.”

Starlight tilted her head and cringed. “Why?”

Sunburst gestured back at the vines. “So, they really didn’t seem to like you taking marks, which is order magic, and they didn’t like marks returning, which is harmony magic. So that means that the vines have to use chaos magic!” He pointed back at the Vault. “And we have a lot of harmony magic stored in that rock!”

Starlight looked at the ground and gulped. “Do we absolutely have to?”

Sunburst comfortingly placed a hoof on her shoulder. “It’s the only way to release that much magic that quickly. Plus,” he continued, “doing this might convince Princess Luna to go a bit easier on you.”

Starlight let out a disappointed sigh at the reminder. “I’m going to prison, aren’t I?”

Sunburst shrugged. “I mean, we still need help with that project I mentioned. Princess Luna did mention potentially pardoning you if you were willing to pitch in.”

Starlight stared up at the Vault and steeled herself. “I guess there’s no turning back, then.”

Lighting her horn, she opened every window of the Vault.

Under the dome, the only sources of light for the group were the lamp on Discord’s head and a soft blue glow far below them. Everything else was pitch black, forcing everypony to watch their step, given that they were standing on the edge of a cavern.

Scootaloo peered over the edge. “So, how do we get down?”

Pinkie had already taken off after noticing a staircase in the faint light and was halfway down when she shouted back, “We take the stairs, silly!”

Everypony followed in relative silence, and the entire group, sans Discord, gasped upon seeing what was at the bottom. The Tree of Harmony, what must have once been a beautiful sight, was in shambles. Vines crisscrossed the entire thing, dimming its glow to be nearly invisible. Parts of the crystal near where the vines touched were a sickly green, and at its foot were two large piles of vines.

Discord hung back, not willing to get all that close. The others, meanwhile, all stepped forward. “It…it looks like it’s dying,” Fluttershy noted sadly.

Applejack was the first to reach the Tree itself. With a small frown, she reached up to her neck and pulled her Element out of its socket. “Here’s hopin’ that this works.”

The Element seemed almost magnetically attracted to the lowest branch of the Tree, flying up to it and socketing itself in a divot. The Tree seemed to respond to it, that branch glowing a bit brighter and the vine retreating.

The others followed suit. Rainbow and Fluttershy flew up to place their Elements on the upper branches, Rarity placed hers on the branch opposite to Applejack’s, and Pinkie bounced all the way up to the final branch to plop her Element in there. At the final placement, the entire tree glowed ever brighter, the many vines snaking across it withering away. That was all it did, though. Beyond the Tree itself, the plundervines were still prevalent, and the dome still stood.

Applejack growled and stamped her hoof. “That’s it?” she demanded. “We go through all that trouble and it ain’t even working?”

Fluttershy frowned. “No, I think there’s more to it,” she said. “We got through all of the problems the Forest threw at us! There’s something more we can do, I just know it!”

Pinkie nodded forcefully. “Yeah! Twilight might be the most magical of us, but even without her, we’re still best friends!” In true Pinkie Pie fashion, she capped off her statement by wrapping them all in a group hug.

At that moment, an additional point of light entered the cave. Much to everypony’s confusion, what looked like Luna’s cutie mark rocketed straight into one of the piles of vines, and a wave of magic washed over them.

“I think I get it too, darlings,” Rarity said as they began to float. “Twilight may be our de facto leader, but our friendship remains!”

“I don’t want to be sappy,” Rainbow added as the group began to glow, “but I could never abandon you girls!”

“Heh, Ah second that one!” Applejack pitched in. “Twilight’s the Element of Magic, but we say it all the time…”

“Friendship is Magic!” all five shouted in unison. In a brilliant flash of light, brightly-colored streams of pure magic shot out from the five Element Bearers and wrapped around the Tree. The Tree’s glow, in turn, increased to the point that the others had to avert their eyes so as to not go blind. A massive magical explosion followed, washing over everypony and utterly disintegrating the plundervines as it went.

The dome collapsed, allowing the moonlight to stream back into the cave and illuminate the two very disoriented alicorns that emerged from the vines. Immediately, most of the group collapsed into bowing, but Celestia just chuckled.

“Rise, my little ponies,” she said. “You all have saved Equestria again. Really, I should be bowing to you!”

Rarity seemed scandalized by the mere suggestion, but Luna spoke before she could protest. “‘Twould seem that the celestial cycle was maintained, even in Our absence.”

“That was meeee!” Discord sing-songed. “No need to thank me.”

“I had to remind him,” Fluttershy stage whispered to Celestia, eliciting another chuckle from the princess.

“Well then,” Discord suddenly said, “if that’s all, I guess I’ll be going!” He snapped his fingers and conjured a door handle midair. Twisting it, he yanked open the air itself.

Before he could walk through, though, Fluttershy ran up to him. “Discord, wait!”

Discord blinked in surprise and turned back towards her. “Whatever is it, my dear?”

“Did you find out anything about Twilight?” Fluttershy asked.

Everypony else went dead silent as Discord slammed the door back shut and grinned. “Why yes, in fact, I have! I thought you'd never ask.”

In an instant, Rainbow had flown over to him and grabbed hold of his goatee. “Where is she?” she demanded.

Discord calmly reached up and pried Rainbow off of him. “Trust me, Skittles, if I could snap my tail and get Bookhorse back here I would.” He shrugged. “But alas, it is not that simple. The universe she got herself stuck in has been on lockdown for thousands of years! Best I can do is get a window in there and watch.”

Celestia frowned. “Could you conjure up a window here, then?”

Discord scoffed. “Given how tethered you ponies are to the fabric of reality, destabilizing it would not be the greatest idea. Moving it from the In-Between to my own pocket dimension without collapsing it was already difficult enough!”

Fluttershy frowned. “What if we went to your dimension, then?”

Discord stroked his goatee. “Yes, I suppose that might work.” He grinned. “Why, I could even show you the greatest hits of the adventures she’s already been on! Watch party at my place!”

With a snap of his fingers, he and everypony in the Tree's cave vanished.

Author's Note

Happy holidays, everyone! I hope you're all fine with my gift being an abnormally long chapter. As it turns out, trying to cram a rework of both the Season 4 and Season 5 premiers into a single chapter was a bit much, but I hope I made it work.

With that issue resolved, though, it's time to head back to Popstar! Next up we have an altered Milky Way Wishes with some external commentary from the Equestrians, so stay tuned for chapter fifteen: A Celestial Squabble!

Chapter XV: A Celestial Squabble

Being teleported without warning, Rainbow Dash decided, was an unpleasant feeling for a pegasus. It was already a disorienting sensation for anypony, but a pegasus’s sense of proprioception, having an additional set of limbs, was quite a bit more advanced than the other pony tribes’. Pegasi also unconsciously used their magic for all things involving flight, granting them an innate sense of barometric pressure, local wind velocity, the ambient temperature, and the like. All in all, it made a sudden, involuntary shift in location almost nauseating for a pegasus in flight, especially one as attuned to the air as Dash was.

Her being upside-down after Discord’s teleport didn’t help matters much, either.

But she was Rainbow Dash, reserve Wonderbolt, fastest pegasus in recorded history, and awesomest pony in Ponyville. She could take anything that draconequus threw at her! In naught but a moment, she had flipped herself upright, landed, and only mildly felt like losing her dinner, thank you very much.

While suppressing her internal desire to ask where the restroom was, she took a moment to verify that everypony was there. The only ponies that Discord had deigned to keep upright and on the floor were the Crusaders and Fluttershy; they were all standing next to what Rainbow assumed was supposed to be a coffee table (given that it was an irregular pentagon and seemed to be made of gelatin, though, she couldn’t be quite sure). Rarity and Applejack were both standing on the wall and rather incensed, glaring at Discord, who himself was unicycling circles around Princesses Celestia and Luna on the ceiling.

Pinkie was just giggling her way down (or was it up, from her perspective?) an upside-down staircase.

Satisfied that everypony was present and accounted for, Rainbow spared a moment to take in her surroundings. Discord’s house was fittingly weird. Beyond the aforementioned gelatin coffee table and upside-down staircase to nowhere, the room also featured seven different styles of couch, wallpaper patterns that changed in random intervals, doors of differing styles and heights, and uneven windows. Rainbow made the mistake of looking out of one of them, into the endless purple void that lay beyond the confines of Discord’s home. She stared, entranced, as the sky swirled and twisted into eldritch patterns, feeling as though it was judging her very soul.

There was a snapping sound, and the window’s curtains–which were somehow tiled in regular pentagons–were pulled in a flash of light. “Try not to stare into the Abyss too long, Miss Dash!” Discord called from the ceiling. “It likes to stare back.”

Rainbow shook her head to clear it before also glaring up at the unicycling draconequus. Celestia cleared her throat with a slight frown. “Discord,” she said calmly, “need I remind you that we are here so you can scry for Twilight and Sunset?”

Discord kick-flipped his unicycle and casually stepped onto the ceiling as his ride folded itself into nonexistence. “Not to worry, dear Celly!” he cheerfully announced, snapping his tail. With the sound of mechanical whirring, the back wall flashed twice and ceased to exist, revealing behind it a black screen. Several pieces of furniture grew legs and assembled themselves in front of it in the style of a theater. “The film will begin shortly!”

“And just how are we supposed to sit in those there couches without gravity?” Applejack asked bitterly.

Discord rolled his eyes and scoffed. “Oh, of course the apple farmer is concerned about gravity.”

“Discord…” Fluttershy said, her voice sterner than usual.

Discord pouted. “You ponies are no fun.”

Still though, he snapped his paw. Applejack and Rarity immediately tumbled to the ground as gravity abruptly switched directions, landing with a grunt and a yelp, respectively. The princesses, meanwhile, gracefully glided to the floor while Discord landed with his body coiled up like a snake’s.

Pinkie just kept walking until she reached the floor, at which point she bent over and jumped back upright. Rainbow chose not to think too hard about that.

With a sproinging sound, Discord shot back up to a standing position, holding two tapes. Tapping his chin, he considered them. “Now, decisions, decisions. Which of Miss Sparkle’s adventures shall I show…?”

Luna glared at him. “We tire of thy games, draconequus.”

Discord whistled. “Wow, testy today, are we? I don’t think I’ve heard you bring out ye olde Ponish in a while!”

“We have business to attend to on Equus,” Luna responded flatly. “If thee will not display Princess Twilight promptly, may We return to it?”

“Oh, dear Lulu, you forget,” Discord grinned, holding up a paw, “I can just bring the business here!”

Before Luna could even open her mouth to protest, Discord snapped. In a flash, two new ponies appeared in the room: a unicorn mare that Rainbow had never seen before, and Sunburst. The two took a moment to get their bearings before reacting. Sunburst immediately collapsed into a bow once he noticed the two princesses, while his companion just looked utterly terrified. Luna whirled around to face them.

“You may rise, Sunburst,” she sighed. Her gaze turned to the other unicorn as she fixed her with a glare and Sunburst skittered off to the side. “As for you, Starlight Glimmer…”

“I give up!” Starlight shouted, sinking to the ground and cowering.

Luna seemed genuinely shocked. “What?”

Starlight didn’t respond, instead quivering under her forehooves. Luna looked at Sunburst for an explanation.

He started a bit at the attention, but quickly responded regardless. “After the vines took you,” he said as he messed about with his glasses a bit, “Starlight and I had a conversation-”

“My life was based on a lie!” Starlight wailed.

“-about that,” Sunburst continued. “And I uh…managed to convince her to give the town their cutie marks back.”

Rainbow wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that. How in the world could somepony take another pony’s cutie mark? Most of her friends seemed to be similarly taken aback, but Fluttershy was the exception. She instead was looking at Starlight with an expression Rainbow recognized quite well–it was the same sort of pitying look she gave Discord during his reformation.

“I even think she’ll want to help us find Princess Twilight!” Sunburst said, blatantly ignoring the fact that Starlight was still sobbing. His face fell slightly. “Though, if you’ve already asked Discord to, I guess that’s moot.”

Luna took a moment to regain her composure. “Even still, her list of crimes-”

“Is shorter than mine, I’m sure!” Discord jovially interrupted. He gestured at himself. “Why, you’re standing in the same room as the mares that managed to reform me!”

“That’s debatable,” Rainbow muttered under her breath.

If Discord heard, he paid her no mind. Instead, he just waved a talon dismissively. “I’m certain that whatever crimes Glim Glam here committed, they’re nothing compared to my past!”

Starlight sniffled a bit and looked up, her fear having given way to confusion. “Glim Glam?”

“Don’t worry about Discord,” Fluttershy said, trotting over and helping Starlight to her hooves. “He likes to give everypony nicknames.”

“Right you are, my dear Shutterfly!” Discord exclaimed.

Celestia comfortingly draped a wing around her sister. “Whatever legal proceedings will be necessary regarding Starlight, we will take care of them in due time,” she reassured. Her gaze turned towards Discord. “Besides, we have more pressing matters to attend to.”

“Ah, of course!” Discord said. With a wave of his talon, he had once again produced the two tapes. “Would you like to see Twilight team up with the natives to take down a battleship, or her harrowing battle over a misunderstanding?”

“Twilight took down what?” Rainbow shouted.

Discord grinned. “Twilight and associates versus the Halberd it is, then!” Spinning around, he chucked the tape at the screen. Instead of finding a slot somewhere or smashing straight through it, the tape instead disappeared directly into the screen with a ripple effect.

“Take a seat, everypony!” Discord gleefully shouted as he vaulted onto a couch. The screen lit up with a panning shot over an ocean. “The show’s about to begin!”

The more of this she watched, the more Celestia grew concerned. This “Halberd” was more than just a battleship. It was a veritable flying fortress, evident by how Twilight and her allies struggled to even board it. And even after they had…

Celestia winced again as she watched them fight through a hallway. Oh, how she detested such violence. But given what limited knowledge she had of the situation, she could understand why they had to fight–she just wished that Sunset didn’t look so pleased with herself as she did so.

Glancing around, the solar princess gauged how the others felt about it. Fluttershy seemed terrified, cowering behind her mane, but still looked on curiously every time a new creature appeared on screen. Rarity and Pinkie both seemed vaguely disappointed, even if Celestia assumed it was for very different reasons. Applejack and Rainbow Dash were both leaning forward, totally engaged with the action. The Cutie Mark Crusaders were all yawning–Celestia supposed that it was rather late at night, at that point–though Scootaloo in particular seemed entranced with the action. Discord was shoveling caramel popcorn into his mouth, Starlight seemed to hardly be paying attention, and Sunburst looked to be scared for his sister’s safety. And Luna…

“Pray tell, dear sister,” Luna said as Sunset fought with a creature that seemed to have total control over ice and snow, “did thee teach Miss Shimmer how to fight?”

Celestia shook her head. “No, I did not. She was insistent upon teaching herself combat magic, though.”

“I expected as much,” Luna said with a nod. “Her form needs work. See there?” she asked, pointing as Sunset and the creature sent streams of fire and ice at each other. “Her use of fire magicks to counter ice is appreciable, but she seems to place emphasis on purely overpowering an opponent, rather than with precise strikes.” Luna shook her head disapprovingly. “Such a strategy will leave a unicorn far more drained than necessary.”

“You know how to fight?” Rainbow Dash asked suddenly.

“I was this realm’s protector for decades before my banishment,” Luna replied. “I ‘know a thing or two’ about it, as I believe the modern saying goes.”

The group once again fell silent as they continued to watch. There were some gasps when Twilight shot a hole in the massive wing above them, and Pinkie seemed to be chewing through her hooves in anxiety as they traversed the air ducts. Eventually, though, Sunburst opened his mouth. “So, if we can see Princess Twilight, why can’t Discord just…” He trailed off.

“Snap my fingers and get her back?” Discord finished. He snapped his paw, and nothing happened. “That whole multiverse is out of bounds.”

Sunburst narrowed his eyes. “But why?”

Discord shrugged. “Void shut down entry to and exit from Its multiverse thousands of years ago. Even I can only get visual and audio through!”

“Who’s Void?” Pinkie asked.

“It created that multiverse!” Discord cheerfully responded, much to everypony’s looks of horror.

Sunburst even physically shook. “Then…how did Princess Twilight get in?”

Discord’s grin widened. “Why, I have no idea! How delightful!”

Rarity’s right eye twitched. “You…don’t know?”

“Nope!” Discord replied. “Oh would you look at that, Sparkle just fell through the floor.”

Everypony’s attention snapped back to the screen and a series of gasps rang out as Twilight was sucked through a hole in the floor after the group took out a giant robot lobster. Her being okay brought several sighs of relief, but now even Celestia couldn’t tear her eyes away from the screen. Everypony’s jaws dropped as they watched Sunset and Kirby do battle with Meta Knight, and the tension was palpable as the ship started going down.

Seeing everyone land safe and sound, though, was greatly relieving for everypony. With a click, the screen shut off and they took a moment to collect their thoughts. “Well,” Rarity breathed, “that was an…experience.”

Rainbow was even physically shaking. “That was AWESOME!”

“Yeah!” Scootaloo emphatically agreed. Gesturing wildly with her hooves, she continued. “When Princess Twilight dodged all those lasers! Oh and when they were fighting everypony in the hallway! AND THEY FOUGHT A ROBOT!”

Both Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle–who had fallen asleep during the screening–were jostled awake at that one. Yawning, Sweetie rubbed her eyes. “Wha…” suddenly she snapped upright. “What’d we miss?”

“Just Princess Twilight being awesome!” Scootaloo responded. After a beat, she continued. “Still not as awesome as Rainbow Dash, though.”

Rainbow grinned and ruffled her mane. “Thanks, Squirt.”

“Perhaps, Discord,” Celestia said, “we should see how Twilight is currently, and then all get some well-deserved rest.”

Discord snapped his tail and the screen lit back up. “One live feed, coming right up!”

The image on screen was now the interior of what Celestia assumed to be a castle, based on its architecture. Concerningly, Twilight seemed to be in a panic, sprinting through the hall with Spike barely keeping up with her. Celestia frowned. “Discord, what’s going on?”

Discord summoned another bucket of popcorn and started munching. “I don’t know! Looks like we have another show on our hooves!”

Everypony leaned forward curiously as Twilight began to speak.

“Spike, go find Bandana and Dedede!” she said as they came to a crossroads in the hallway. “See if they know what’s going on.”

“You got it, Twi!” Spike replied, swinging to his right. Before he ran off, though, he looked back. “What about you?”

Twilight ruffled her wings and looked to her left. “I’ll fly to Orange Ocean and see if Meta Knight knows why the Sun and Moon are fighting.”

Even Celestia was taken aback by that. Her eyes wider than they had been in centuries, she looked at Discord. “That world’s sun and moon are what?”

Wordlessly, Discord gestured. The field of view on the screen pulled back through a few walls until they could see the outside of the castle. Sure enough, high above it and the mountains around it, the Sun and Moon were fighting for dominance in the sky.

“Wh-where’s Sunset?” Sunburst shakily asked.

Sunset twitched in her sleep and slowly opened her eyes. Groaning, she pulled her blanket up over her head as sunlight streamed through her window. She’d picked this room specifically to avoid this kind of awakening, goddamnit!

Wait a minute.

Sunset launched her blanket off of her and sat straight up in her bed. Her window was on the west side of the room, and there was sunlight illuminating the entire room. She knew she was tired after last night, but there was no way she’d slept so long it was this late in the afternoon already! But there the Sun was, at an angle she could see it clearly!

Then the Moon–the one that Kirby blew up–came out of nowhere and slammed right into the Sun. The two celestial bodies struggled for a bit longer before their brawl took them back above the castle and out of Sunset’s view. Bewildered, she walked over to the window, opened it, and stuck her head out for a better view. “What in the world?” she whispered.

“Hey, Sunny-Shim!” she heard Marx call. Glancing around, she saw him bounce toward her window, still on his ball. His grin, though, was absent. Instead, for the first time, Marx looked truly panicked. “Could I talk to ya for a sec?”

Luckily, her room was at ground level, so she could easily just open the window the rest of the way and hop out, telekinetically shutting it behind her. “Hey Marx,” she said while trotting towards him. “Any idea on what the fuck is happening?”

Marx looked up at the sky and frowned. “Well, it looks like the Sun and Moon are fighting.”

“You don’t say,” Sunset said dryly.

“But,” Marx continued, “I think I know how to fix it!”

Sunset blinked. “You do?”

“Uh huh!” Marx affirmed. “We’ve gotta summon Galactic Nova!”

Several thoughts started streaming through Sunset’s head. “The Galactic Nova,” Sunset clarified. “The one that could grant any wish?”

Marx nodded. “That’s the one! It’s the only way to get those two to stop.” He started rolling away. “Come on! We’ve gotta get to the Fountain of Dreams!”

For a moment, Sunset was locked in place, an internal debate raging in her mind. Some quiet part of her brain brought up that she should go tell Twilight about this plan. That getting more help would be necessary to stop this. But a, if smaller, much louder part of her mind was shouting that this was her chance. She could help Marx summon Nova and hijack it at the last minute, getting her back to Equestria with the power to take it over.

And to hell with that nagging feeling of discontent with leaving the others behind. She could still do this alone, thank you very much.

Still, though, there was the issue of even getting to the Fountain in the first place. It was normally a several hour’s walk from Castle Dedede to the Fountain of Dreams, but in such an emergency, that would take far too long. But without asking Twilight, the only other way there quickly was stupidly reckless. Downright insane, even. Sunset smirked. It was right up her alley.

Her plan set, Sunset nodded. “Marx, wait up!” she called, racing after him. “The Fountain works to heal mana burn! I could teleport us there!”

Marx turned around, stars in his eyes. “Really?”

Sunset grinned and lit her horn. One flash of aquamarine light later, and the pair had traversed the great distance between Castle Dedede and the Fountain in naught but an instant.

Sunset regretted that decision instantly. Her long-range teleport had netted her a stabbing headache, an extreme feeling of nausea, and her vision blurring so much she could barely register that they’d arrived in Rainbow Resort. Panting, Sunset stumbled forward and plunged face-first into the waters of the Fountain.

Marx raised an eyebrow. “Sunset? You alright?”

Yanking her face out of the water, Sunset inhaled sharply. Mana–pure, distilled magic–swirled around her horn and her eyes even glowed. The Star Rod glowed with them, directing the Fountain’s magical field lines straight to her, replenishing her internal magic stores far faster than would be natural. It wasn’t painful–far from it, actually. It felt more like she was getting ten hours of sleep in only a few seconds.

The sensation didn’t last very long, though. The magic absorbed itself into her horn and Sunset was left panting. Not in exhaustion, this time, but in surprise. She’d gone from complete mana burn to feeling better than she had in…ever, really. With the amount of magic the Fountain had just restored, she felt like she could take on an alicorn and win.

She blinked. Alright, maybe that would be a bit of a stretch. Regardless, though, Sunset looked at the Fountain with a new sense of wonder. If such an artifact could heal her where even a maxim tomato couldn’t, what else did this universe hold?

“Um, Sunset?” Marx asked, peeking up from a bush he’d hid behind once Sunset started glowing. “What just happened?”

Sunset grinned. “The Fountain just healed my mana burn, that’s what!” She looked back up at the Star Rod, wincing as the Sun took such a heavy blow it was launched over the horizon. “So, what do we do now?”

Marx rolled over to join her. “Well, according to the legends, the Star Rod will create a summoning star if the right person approaches it.” Despite not having limbs, he still seemed to gesture upward at it. “Look how it’s glowing. I think you can get it to do that!”

Sunset frowned. “Ancient magical artifact that only responds to the ‘right’ creature, huh?” She climbed onto the Fountain’s rim. “Back in my homeworld, that’d mean a pony would have to touch it or magically activate it.”

She reached out a hoof, and as soon as she contacted the Star Rod, it glowed even brighter than the Sun–which had rushed back at the Moon and was once again engaged in battle on the other side of the sky. So bright was its splendor that Sunset had to look away and shield her eyes. Soon enough, though, the light faded.

Instead, at the foot of the Fountain rested a yellow star-shaped object, like an upscaled version of the Star Rod’s tip. Marx seemed almost mesmerized by it.

“A Warp Star,” he breathed. “I never thought I’d get to ride on one of these.”

Sunset hopped down to the ground. “I guess this is how we get to the other Fountains?”

Marx nodded. “It has to be.” Abandoning his ball, he hopped on to the star. It was a bit of a tight squeeze, but Sunset was able to join him as well. Curiously, the Warp Star seemed to respond to her thoughts, lifting off with only a mental command.

It was a bit foalish, but a cheeky grin spread over Sunset’s face. She couldn’t even stop herself from giggling at the absurdity of it all. The Sun and Moon were fighting and she was going into space to help stop them. “You ready, Marx?”

“Yepperoni!” he answered.

There had to be some sort of magical protection for people on a Warp Star, because it accelerated from rest to several kilometers per second in no time at all while managing to not liquidate the passengers. They were quite literally off like a rocket, and Sunset could feel her smile widen with every passing moment. Soon, they had passed the upper atmosphere, and for the first time, Sunset got a good look at Popstar as a whole. Her jaw dropped.

Apparently physics was out to lunch, because the entire planet was star-shaped. And yellow. Oh, and either the Warp Star took some air with them, or they could breathe in space. She wasn’t quite sure how that was supposed to work, but this universe had thrown her so many curveballs she wasn’t even that surprised at this point. Shaking her head to clear it, she looked forward. “So, where to, first?” she asked.

Marx performed as much of a shrug as a living sphere was capable of. “From what I remember of the stories, every planet in this system has a Fountain.”

Sunset’s gaze locked on the nearest other planet: a sphere so green it looked like the entire thing was one big forest. She rolled her shoulders and mentally directed the Warp Star towards it. “Closest one it is, then!”

Author's Note

And with that, Milky Way Wishes has official begun! With Marx having pivoted his plans around entirely, Kirby is now out of the picture. And since Twilight's off asking the Meta-Knights for help, that leaves Sunset as the only thing between him and world domination. Of course, since it's Sunset, it's hardly that simple.

This'll be fun to write.

I do know this chapter's a bit on the shorter side (and over half of it is Discord catching the others up on Twilight's adventures), but this was essentially what amounts to a prologue for the MWW arc. Including this one, I plan for this arc to have eleven total chapters, though I might merge a couple depending on how long some of the planets take to get through. For now, though, stay tuned for Chapter Sixteen: Floria, the Wooded World

Chapter XVI: Floria, the Wooded World

Discord’s living room was, for once, almost entirely silent. The only sounds were the crunching of Discord’s popcorn and the Warp Star’s twinkling coming through the window. Everpony besides Discord was staring slack-jawed at the screen, attempting (and failing) to comprehend what was going on. Eventually, though, somepony had to break the silence.

That pony was Starlight. “What the f-”

“Ahem!” Applejack cleared her throat. Starlight’s gaze snapped over to her and she gestured to the half-asleep Crusaders.

“Sorry,” Starlight amended, “what the hay?”

“Sunset’s in space,” Sunburst stated in reply.

“That would appear to be the case, does it not?” Discord said as he ran out of popcorn, shrugged, and just took a bite out of the bowl.

“Sunset’s in space,” Sunburst repeated.

“I do believe that that has been well established, darling,” Rarity responded.

“Sunset. Is in. Space,” Sunburst emphasized. “On a star-shaped ship that can accelerate instantly and is going between planets to summon something that can grant any wish. To stop the Sun and Moon from fighting.”

“That is an apt summary, yes,” Luna agreed.

There was a moment of silence before Sunburst collapsed back into the couch he was sitting on. “Discord,” he asked, “do you have anything stronger than water?”

Discord snapped a talon, summoning a bottle of Prench red wine and a wineglass. As Sunburst took them with his telekinesis, Starlight raised an eyebrow at him. “Do you even drink?”

“Only on occasion,” Sunburst responded, taking care to prevent the cork from launching across the room when he popped it.

“You sure about drinking that, then?” Starlight asked, her nose scrunching up as she caught a whiff of the wine. “That smells pretty strong.”

Sunburst poured himself a glass and raised it to his lips. He recoiled a bit at the taste, but took a sip anyway. “Starlight,” he explained, “my sister just broke over a dozen laws of physics in under thirty seconds. If I think about this while sober, I’ll have a panic attack. And probably an aneurysm.”

As Sunset and Marx approached the plant-covered planet, the former was forced to admit to herself that “planet” was being a bit generous. The rock looked barely large enough to force itself into a sphere, and yet that didn’t stop its entire northern hemisphere from being absolutely covered in plant life. Its southern half, Sunset realized as they approached, was entirely barren.

Once again, Sunset found herself grateful for whatever protective magicks the Warp Star held. Instead of being incinerated upon atmospheric reentry, the air around them barely even got any hotter than room temperature. They were able to descend unhindered until they were just above the treetops, where Sunset leveled out the Warp Star.

Scanning the trees below her for any sign of this planet’s Fountain, Sunset opened her mouth. “So, any intel on what this place is?”

Marx frowned a bit as he looked around. “Not much. I know it’s called Floria, at least. No one on Popstar knows for certain why only half the planet has vegetation, but it’s speculated that its Fountain of Dreams has something to do with it.”

“So the Fountain’s probably at the pole, then,” Sunset concluded. With a thought, she directed the Warp Star northwards. The pair sped along, whisking some leaves from the upper canopy along in their wake. “The whole northern hemisphere is a forest?” she asked. “No oceans or anything?”

“Nope!” Marx replied. “That’s part of why everyone thinks that it’s the Fountain.”

“So there’s probably not much of a native population, huh?” Sunset figured.

“Probably not,” Marx agreed. He seemed to consider it for a second. “Though, I guess some Dees and Doos and other Dreamlanders might’ve made their way up here.”

The Warp Star almost stalled completely at Sunset’s surprise, but she got it moving again quickly. “How?”

“Well, it’s not too difficult to fly here if you’ve got the means to!” Marx answered. “Especially if you’re teaming up with a Capsule J or J2 or something. It’d still take a few days without a Warp Star, though.”

Sunset glanced upward, where Popstar and its dueling satellites were still plainly visible. “I guess everything in this universe is just…closer together than I was expecting.”

“What, are planets in your home universe, like, millions of kilometers away, or something?” Marx asked curiously.

“Pretty much, yeah,” Sunset confirmed. “I mean, Equestria hasn’t even developed space travel yet, and the furthest people on Earth have gotten is their Moon–four hundred thousand kilometers away.” At Marx’s somewhat shocked look, she continued. “And the closest other planet to Earth was, like, forty million kilometers away on average.”

“That sounds a lot like Deep Space, actually,” Marx remarked.

“Deep Space?” Sunset inquired.

“The space beyond planet Halfmoon,” Marx answered. “We just know that it’s a lot more spread out than Popstar’s system. Some stuff has come from Deep Space, but I don’t think any native Dreamlander has been to Deep Space. Heck, I doubt we’ll run into anyone from Dreamland further out than Mekk-WATCH OUT!”

Sunset’s gaze snapped forward, and her eyes promptly widened to the size of dinner plates. The Warp Star, still dead-set on its northward trajectory, had flown them directly into a cloud. A rather stormy one, at that.

“Shit!” Sunset swore as she took Warp Star’s mental reigns. Once again thankful for its acceleration-dampening effect, she was able to swerve it just in time to miss a hailstone the size of a softball. The ball of ice whizzed right by her head, missing by only centimeters.

Their misfortune wasn’t quite over yet, though. For a brief moment, it felt like every hair on Sunset’s body was standing up completely straight, and she had just barely enough time to protect them from what was to come. In a split second, she had erected a magical–and importantly, conducting–spherical shield around them. It was hasty, and if she had more than a quarter-second’s warning, it would’ve been far better, but it was enough of a Faraneigh cage to protect them from the electrical discharge of an intracloud lightning strike.

“We need to get out of here!” Marx shouted over the screaming wind.

“Working on it,” Sunset grunted, focusing all her willpower on getting the Warp Star out of the cloud as quickly as possible.

Of course, as if the universe had heard them, it decided to choose that moment to strike again. Apparently they had passed over an updraft, because another hailstone, this one the size of a bowling ball, slammed into the Warp Star from below. The hailstone itself ricocheted off and out of sight, but their ride had completely disintegrated into tiny, star-shaped motes of light, which converged around Sunset and seemed to absorb themselves into her horn.

With the updraft still strong, Sunset and Marx had the briefest of moments to look at each other in surprise before they started falling.

Both started screaming, and Sunset, perhaps instinctually, grabbed ahold of Marx’s left foot. As they descended, she hurriedly lit her horn and, in a panic, started mentally going through every spell she knew that might slow their fall. Self-levitation, cushioning charms, anything. None of it lasted long, in her panicky state, but it resulted in a sort of jerking motion, where they would rapidly slow down for a few seconds before gravity once again took hold. So she could be excused for not noticing when one of those jerks didn’t come from her magic. Instead, it was as if Marx had pulled them upwards a bit.

She was a bit more focused on the approaching canopy, anyway.

With a crash, the pair slammed into leaves. In the small part of Sunset’s mind that wasn’t preoccupied with keeping them alive, she noticed an oddity in their color. Rather than the vibrant summer greens that they had passed over so far, the leaves were rust red, almost as if it was autumn underneath the cloud.

Sunset couldn’t spare much thought on considering that, though. She’d kept her horn lit as they fell, and another cushioning charm reduced her slamming shoulder-first into a branch from potentially fatal to merely painful. The impact slowed them down by quite a bit as well, making the next branch slightly less painful, still. They continued ricocheting down the tree for a slight bit longer, slamming into a few more branches along the way until they finally exited the tree’s crown and fell directly onto a snowdrift.

The two of them just laid in the snow, panting, for a few seconds. “Sunset,” Marx eventually said, “next time try not to fly right into a storm.”

Sunset rubbed her bruised shoulder and groaned. “Noted.”

“You alright?” Marx asked, what sounded like concern tingeing his voice.

“I’ll be fine,” Sunset reassured. “At least with all this around I can…ice…it.” She blinked and sat up straight, suddenly realizing that the ground was layered in a soft blanket of snow. “Wasn’t it summer thirty seconds ago?”

Indeed, it seemed a wintry storm had overtaken the area around them. Snowflakes drifted downward from the clouds above them, accompanied by the leaves that were still in the process of falling. It was like someone had flipped the switch from summer to winter and didn’t give the trees enough time to keep up.

Sunset glanced over at Marx, who had gathered up a large snowball to stand on. “Any thoughts?”

Marx pursed his lips in thought. “Not really. If I had to guess, I’d say the Fountain’s causing this.”

Sunset looked up, and with the last of the trees’ leaves finally falling to the ground, she could get a good look at the sky. The storm stretched from horizon to horizon in all directions, offering very little in terms of determining direction. “Any chance you brought a compass?”

Marx snorted. “Even if I did, I don’t think that’d work on a planet this small.”

“Damn.”

Marx joined her in looking at the sky. His gaze, though, drifted closer to the horizon where, in one direction in particular, the clouds seemed a bit thicker. “How much would you bet that the storm gets worse closer to the Fountain?”

Sunset shivered a bit as a chilly wind blew through. Looking in the same direction as him, she narrowed her eyes. “I don’t really gamble,” she answered, “but I’d be willing to put down a grand on you being right.”

Celestia placed a hoof over her chest and felt her racing heartbeat. That was far, far too close. “Discord, are you absolutely certain that you cannot protect them?”

Discord scoffed and held up his paw, where his thumb was tied to his pinky. “Unless Void lightens up anytime soon, my appendages are tied.”

“How convenient,” Rarity muttered.

“Ah just wanna mention real quick,” Applejack said, and everypony looked at her. “Did anypony else notice that Marx feller sprout wings?”

“Yeah, what’s up with that?” Rainbow asked. “You’d think he’d use them more. Flying’s awesome!”

“That’s what Ah wanna know,” Applejack replied. “He put ‘em away ‘fore Sunset could get a look at ‘em. Ah think he’s hidin’ somethin’.”

“Those wings did look pretty scary,” Fluttershy whispered.

Pinkie gasped. “What if he’s shy about them because they look scary?”

Luna glanced at the Element bearers with a raised eyebrow. “Perhaps we should not be so hasty in jumping to conclusions.”

“I have to wonder why the seasons jumped around,” Starlight piped up. “That just seems weird, even for magic.”

Sunburst just looked at his mostly-empty wineglass, sighed, and filled it back up.

It took them around fifteen minutes of traveling before anything interesting happened. The storm, as they predicted, had gotten worse as they traveled north. What was once a simple flurry of snow had become blizzard conditions. Around ten minutes in, Sunset had had to start using a warming charm on herself and Marx, and for the past two minutes she’d had a shield in front of them to protect them from the snow.

Then, all at once, it stopped.

Entirely without warning, the blizzard cleared and a mass of warmer air hit them. The harsh snow gave way to, if still cloudy, mercifully silent skies. Grateful for the reprieve, Sunset let her warming charm and shield drop. That hadn’t cut too deeply into her mana stores–really, she could keep the charm up indefinitely; the passive draw on her mana was slower than her body could replenish it–but it was still physically tiring.

Curiously, along with the weather clearing, the snow on the ground was melting as well. Fast. The temperature couldn’t have been any higher than a warm spring day and she had been trudging through snow up to her barrel, but most of it had already melted, turning the ground into a muddy mess. Marx’s eyes widened as his snowball suddenly became quite unstable, and he was only saved from faceplanting into the mud by Sunset’s quick thinking and telekinesis.

“Thanks for that,” Marx said once he was safely standing.

Of course, he was light enough that he could stand on top of the mud no problem, the lucky bastard. Sunset was left hock-deep in the stuff. Still though, she shot him a smile. “No problem.”

They got moving again, trying to at least stay in the same general direction as they had been going. As they walked, Sunset couldn’t help but stare up in amazement at the trees. Before her very eyes, leaves budded and grew in record time, and within a few minutes, the forest’s canopy had completely recovered. A few cherry blossoms even floated down around them as they trudged forward, Sunset’s hooves making a loud squelch every time she forced them out of the mud.

Eventually, they reached a clearing, once again granting them a full view of the sky. The cloud cover was still there, a dark gray covering the entire sky. Further to where Susnet hoped was the north, they were even darker, and she felt a bit of a chilly gust of wind come from that direction. Clearly, there was another storm rolling in.

“Well, Sunset, I think that’s where we need to go,” Marx said.

Sunset grimaced a bit. “I hope we’re right about this. The weather’s only gonna get worse, and I want to get off this rock as soon as possible.”

“Oh come on, Sunny Shim!” Marx jovially said, skipping forward. “We just walked through a blizzard! How bad could it really get?”

Twenty minutes later, it had gotten worse.

Far, far, worse.

Gale-force winds buffeted the pair in their attempts to move forward. The rain was coming down so hard that Sunset could barely see further than half a meter ahead of her. In combination, it had forced her to put another shield up; rain moving at dozens of kilometers per hour hurt. Additionally, as if that wasn’t enough, there was a flash of lightning and an uncomfortably close crash of thunder every few seconds.

At least the rain had washed away the mud. And apparently this was far from uncommon, as it seemed that all of the surrounding topsoil had been washed away by the torrential downpours. Sunset wasn’t quite sure how the trees were still standing–or how they’d even grown in the first place–but that wasn’t all that important to her at the moment.

“You just had to tempt fate, huh?” Sunset attempted to shout over the howling wind.

Marx couldn’t even hear her.

Sunset rolled her eyes and kept moving, but only made it a few more steps before her vision went white. The deafening roar of thunder washed over her, and she collapsed to the ground in pain. The lightning hadn’t struck her, thankfully, but it was still close enough that she’d essentially been flashbanged. It took her a precious few seconds to recover her vision enough that she could look around. She was still blinking spots out of her eyes and had an incessant ringing in her ears, but it was enough sensory input for her to realize the danger she and Marx were in.

Just to their left was what was left of a tree that the lightning must have struck. The trunk had split in twain and caught ablaze. Even with the rain pelting it, the winds were feeding it so much oxygen it was able to stay alight. And it was falling, too–right for them.

“Oh fuck!” Sunset swore, but it sounded muffled, even to her. “Marx, move!”

Her shout, predictably, was useless. Marx was still blinking rapidly and had been deafened by the thunder as well. The flaming remains of the massive tree trunk was bearing down on them, so they really didn’t have time to recover. Sunset grit her teeth and made a split-second decision.

Just before the tree could land on them, she lit her horn and dove forward, grabbing Marx in her forehooves. The pair vanished in a flash of aquamarine light. Milliseconds later, they reappeared safely out of the tree’s way, and the flaming log hit the ground with a crash neither of them could hear.

Panting, Sunset looked over at Marx, who was–thankfully–very much still alive. His vision seemed to have recovered, at least, since he was staring at the log with a flabbergasted expression. The pair sat there for a few minutes as their hearing recovered, Sunset’s shield sparing them from the worst of the rain. Eventually, Sunset spoke.

“That was way too close,” she shouted. Her voice still sounded distorted, but evidently it had been long enough that they could hear each other, because Marx nodded.

“Thanks again,” he shouted back, the wind still forcing them to raise their voices.

Sunset smiled. “No problem.” With a grunt, she pushed herself to her hooves. “We should get moving!”

“Do you have an idea of what direction to go?” Marx asked.

Sunset’s smile evolved into a grin. “We’re close enough that I can feel it at this point!” She pointed in the general direction they had been going. “Whatever’s over there is putting out a massive magical field. If it’s not the Fountain, I’ll eat my hat!”

Marx raised an eyebrow. “Do you even have a hat?”

Sunset waved a hoof dismissively as she got moving. “Eh, it’s a figure of spee-WHOA!”

Her forehoof that was still on the ground suddenly slipped out from under her, sending her tumbling down onto her side. Questioningly, she looked at what she’d stepped on. “What the…ice?”

A large raindrop hit the ground just in front of them, freezing nearly instantly.

Sunset’s eyes widened. “Shit!” Rapidly lighting her horn, she began preparing the most powerful warming spell she knew.

“What’s wrong?” Marx inquired.

His answer came from the log that had nearly crushed them only moments ago. All at once, the crackling of its flames went silent as frost began to coat the wood. The leaves of the surrounding trees didn’t even have time to turn red before they were coated in ice and began to plummet to the ground, too heavy for the branches to keep up. Marx began to shiver, but Sunset’s spell activated before either could take any serious damage from the exposure.

Nearly instantly, a sphere of warmer air had surrounded the two of them. It wasn’t spectacularly warm, only around the same temperature as a chilly autumn day. But given that another tree had just exploded as its cells froze, Sunset was happy with anything above freezing.

Surrounding their bubble of habitable air was one of her shields, calibrated such that it was kept exceedingly hot. Enough so that the freezing rain couldn’t actually freeze on it, and slid off towards the ground.

“We need to move. Now,” Sunset stressed.

“No complaints from me,” Marx said. “Lead the way.”

Sunset led them for another few hundred meters through the frozen forest, following the draw of the Fountain’s magic. Unlike Popstar’s Fountain, which had given off a feeling of serenity and peace, Floria’s Fountain felt wild and free. She supposed it made sense. After all, if the Fountain really was what made the northern hemisphere habitable, it had to bring nature’s destructive side with it.

Sunset smiled to herself in amusement. “Nature giveth, and nature taketh away,” she muttered.

“What was that?” Marx asked.

“Just a quote,” Sunset said. “Well, a bastardized one, but it felt topical.” A few more seconds passed in silence before she broke it again. “We’re close. Probably only a couple dozen meters away.”

Visibility was still too low to know for sure, but she felt certain of it. That wild magic was so strong she felt like she could smell it.

Strong enough that a tree could apparently sprout up from the ground right in front of them.

Both Sunset and Marx stopped short, and then backed up when the tree sprouted eyes and a mouth. “What the hell?” Sunset asked.

The tree was massive, and looked like it was probably an oak, if Sunset’s limited knowledge of dendrology was enough to identify it. It had lost its leaves to the weather, just like the other trees in the forest, but Sunset didn’t exactly feel like underestimating something at this rate. Its expression seemed rather angry, and based on its size it was probably several centuries old.

Marx grinned and tilted his head a bit. “Hey, do you know a Whispy Woods?”

“Who in the world is Whispy Woods?” a voice bellowed from behind them. Sunset and Marx whipped around to see that a second tree with a face had sprouted from the ground, somehow completely unnoticed until now.

At Sunset giving Marx a confused look, he approximated as much of a shrug as he could without arms. “It was worth a shot.”

“Trespassers!” the first tree shouted. “You have one chance to turn around and abandon this sacred ground!”

Sunset felt her blood boil. Much as she was loath to underestimate anything, she still couldn’t help but feel that there was just about zero chance she was going to be stopped by a couple of trees. “Yeah, we kinda need the Fountain for something, so if you’d just let us pass we’ll be on our w-”

“Then perish,” the tree interrupted.

Immediately, a sharpened root shot out from the ground and headed straight for Sunset’s bubble. She and Marx both dived to avoid it, but wound up trying to dodge in different directions. The bubble stayed centered on Sunset, forcing Marx to bounce off the interior shield and land on Sunset’s back.

“Well, they don’t seem happy,” Marx noted.

Sunset didn’t respond, instead grunting as she quickly ran to the side to avoid the two Gordos the trees had dropped from their upper branches.

“Can’t you hit them with a flamethrower or something?” Marx asked once they had a bit of down time.

“I’m a bit focused on making sure we don’t freeze to death,” Sunset said. She dodged another root. “If I drop concentration on the shield, we’ll last seconds at best. Any ideas?”

Marx hummed in thought for a moment. “What if you make the shield itself super hot and let it get hit?”

“If you care to boil alive, sure!”

“But if you time it right?”

Sunset jumped over a wave of extremely cold air that one of the trees had breathed at her. She spun around and, catching sight of another attacking root, grit her teeth. “Only one way to find out!”

Just before the root struck home, her horn’s corona flared so bright Marx had to look away. The shield reached hundreds of degrees in mere moments, instantly igniting the offending root. The defense couldn’t last, of course. If she kept up that sort of temperature for too long it would absolutely kill both her and Marx. But it was survivable for a few seconds, long enough for her to shut off the excess heat and let the extreme cold bleed it off.

The burned tree audibly hissed and drew back its attack. “You dare?” it bellowed.

What must have been at least a dozen Gordos fell from the trees’ branches, and Sunset prepared herself to try and dodge again, but the universe seemed to be in her favor, finally. With a rumble of distant thunder, the temperature rapidly increased again. The freezing rain stopped sticking to the ground, becoming something more akin to an early spring downpour.

The extreme heat from earlier had already melted most of the ice in the area, which only helped heat up the atmosphere around them even more. Comfortable that they wouldn’t immediately get hypothermia, Sunset let her warming spell drop and grinned. Now that she was freer with her magic, she could afford to let loose a bit.

Every single Gordo that the trees had launched found themselves caught in Sunset’s telekinesis. With a shout, she chucked them back at the trees, where the Gordos embedded themselves in their trunks. They cried out in pain, but Sunset’s attention was elsewhere. Particularly, at the rapidly-budding leaves on the trees’ branches.

She wasn’t sure what attack they’d have lined up, but she wasn’t about the find out. Grinning like a shark, she felt her cutie mark magic activate and uttered a single word.

“Burn.”

Rarity was rather glad that she’d asked Pinkie to find the Crusaders somewhere to sleep a few minutes ago. The action was clearly not safe for foals to view, even if Scootaloo would have found it “awesome,” she was sure.

She really should talk to Scootaloo’s aunts about that tendency, Rarity supposed.

Regardless, though, the foals’ tiredness spared them and Pinkie from the horrors on-screen. Rarity felt slightly ill watching it, as the clearly sapient trees went up in flames and screamed in pain. Applejack looked to be on the verge of weeping for the oaks, Fluttershy had hid behind her mane and was silently sobbing, and even Rainbow Dash had lost some of her enthusiasm. Hay, even Discord seemed disconcerted.

The worst of it, Rarity thought, was Sunset’s expression. She was grinning like a pyromaniac through the entire thing. And Rarity could see that Princess Celestia was taking it the hardest.

The usually regal mare had physically slumped into the couch. Her mane spilled around her head as she looked down at the ground. Rarity didn’t like to presume–especially when it came to royalty–but she had to think that the princess was mourning the loss of her mentorship over her former student.

The only ponies with differing reactions were Starlight, who seemed mildly disturbed but understanding, Sunburst, who was watching the screen with a deadened–though perhaps slightly sad–gaze, and Princess Luna, whose reaction was…interesting.

The Princess of the Night hummed in thought. “It seems that Miss Shimmer kept to her earlier declaration,” she eventually said. “She kept them alive.”

Everypony’s attention snapped to her. “The…the trees are okay?” Fluttershy shakily asked.

“Well, okay is probably a stretch,” Starlight said, “but look at where she burned them. It was all places that they’ll be able to recover from.”

Sunburst wordlessly nodded.

“You have a…keen eye, Miss Glimmer,” Luna forced out, as if she was rather unhappy to give Starlight a compliment. Celestia, meanwhile, seemed to be recovering from her shock, letting out a relieved exhale.

“And,” Discord cut in, “they’re right next to the Fountain of Dreams! They can heal themselves as soon as Shim Sham and Karl are gone!”

“Okay, I get your other nicknames,” Rainbow said, “but why Karl?”

Discord grinned and simply did not answer.

Floria’s Fountain of Dreams, much like Popstar’s, was in a clearing. It was a smaller clearing than the Rainbow Resort, of course, but one that stretched all the way up to the sky. The clouds came to an abrupt stop at the edge of a cylinder centered on the Fountain, allowing Sunset and Marx an unobstructed view all the way to space.

The Fountain itself was of the exact same design as Popstar’s, but felt extraordinarily different. Popstar’s Fountain was soothing, but Floria’s…Sunset wasn’t quite sure. In the storm, it felt wild, as if trying to break free from some sort of restraint. But here, in what must have been the eye of the storm, it felt completely quiet. Silent, but very, very powerful.

Sunset once again felt the Fountain rejuvenate her mana stores as she reached up to touch the Star Rod. Another flash of light, and a new Warp Star, this one a different color, formed. The pair hopped on, wordlessly nodded to each other, and shot off into space.

Author's Note

Summoning Stars: 2/8

And that's Floria cleared! I know my take on it is rather different from how it's presented in Super Star and its remake, but I wanted to run with the idea of rapidly shifting seasons, rather than four different versions of the same room in a superposition of sorts. Lore-wise and story-wise I try to be as accurate to the source material as possible, but for details like this I love expanding on them!

Oh, and I want to clarify something about this universe's version of Floria that I couldn't find a way to work into the text itself. It does have Dreamlanders on it, they just live further to the south, away from the wilder magic the Fountain gives off. My original draft of the chapter included Sunset and Marx coming across a Waddle Dee that helped them out with directions, but it threw off the entire tone of the chapter, so I had to cut the scene.

In any case, we're on to Aquarius! I hope you all brought your wetsuits, because it's time to explore the murky depths in Chapter Seventeen: Aquarius, the Water World.

Chapter XVII: Aquarius, the Water World

[I know I usually put my Author's Notes at the end of chapters, but I just wanted to quickly touch on something before this one begins. This chapter marks the first real instance of the gore and death tags for this fic being justified. It's nothing major, but I wanted to point it out just in case, since it's a bit of a tonal shift that'll crop up again in the future. With that said, enjoy the chapter!]

As Floria faded into the distance behind them, Sunset spared a glance over at Popstar. Even at this distance, the Sun and Moon’s battle was plainly visible, though she supposed that perhaps that distance wasn’t all that great. Popstar seemed to be around the same size as Earth–and Equus, for that matter–and they couldn’t have been more than ten thousand kilometers away from it at this point. Things really were far closer together here than back home.

Forcing her mind back to the situation at hand, Sunset directed the Warp Star towards the next closest speck of light. “Alright, what do you know about our next target?” she asked.

“Aquarius is nearly entirely covered by one giant ocean,” Marx replied, the planet in question coming into view. “The Fountain might be underwater, for all we know.”

As they got closer, Sunset was able to confirm that Aquarius was, in fact, a bluer marble than even Earth. It wasn’t particularly large, smaller than Floria, even, but what surface it had was absolutely covered in water. From space, only a few small islands near the equator were visible, poking out above the surface. “Well that’s…unideal,” Sunset said. “Any plans?”

“None other than asking the locals for help.” Marx responded. “Aim for one of the islands. Maybe there’s a fishing village or something.”

Sunset nodded, plunging the Warp Star into Aquarius’s atmosphere. Just as with Floria, it hardly heated up at all. Just another quirk of this universe’s physics, Sunset supposed. Being able to stop on a dime was a plus too, letting them get down to a few meters above the ground without immediately dying.

Keeping the Warp Star hovering a bit in the air, Sunset glanced around at where they’d chosen to land. The island was clearly tropical, with a few palm trees scattered about. Marx was right about there being a village as well, given that there were a few thatch-roofed buildings around and several very curious locals.

“Hey, Sunset,” Marx asked, “do you know how to actually land this thing?”

Sunset frowned. “Maybe?”

“That is not reassuring.”

The Warp Star proceeded to drop like a rock, shattering into dozens of motes of light and dropping its occupants uncomfortably on the ground. The star-shaped remains of their ride once again orbited Sunset once before absorbing themselves into her horn.

“I think you dropped us down faster than free fall would’ve,” Marx groaned.

Sunset sighed and pushed herself to her hooves. “Well sorry if it’s my first time trying to land a spaceship with my brain!”

A Waddle Dee walked up to them. “Are uh, you two alright?” the concerned bystander asked.

Sunset brushed herself off as Marx hopped to his feet. “We’re good!” he replied. “Say, you wouldn’t happen to know where this planet’s Fountain of Dreams would be, would you?”

The Waddle Dee backed up and narrowed his eyes. “Why’re you looking for it?”

Sunset pointed up, where Popstar and its celestial problems were visible, clear as day. Until it became night. And then day again. “We’re trying to stop that.”

The Dee looked up, his eyes widening.

“So we’ll ask again,” Sunset said, “do you know where the Fountain of Dreams is?”

The Waddle Dee shuddered and tore his gaze from the sky. “I don’t,” he said, “but I know someone who might.” He pointed down the path into the village. “There’s a Simirror who lives by the docks that should be able to help you.”

Marx grinned. “Thanks!” Without another word, he ran off into the village, Sunset following close behind.

“Wait!” the Dee called. Sunset stalled and turned around to look at him curiously. Marx, it seemed, was already out of earshot, though. “Are you really gonna summon Nova to stop the Sun and Moon?”

Sunset hesitated, but only for a fraction of a second. The Waddle Dee, at least, didn’t seem to notice her mistake, and her lie came out as smooth as ever. “Yes.”

“Hey girls, what’d I miss?”

Rarity started and placed a hoof over her chest as Pinkie manifested herself right next to her. “Pinkie, you nearly gave me a heart attack!”

“Oops. Sorry, Rarity!”

“‘Tis quite alright, darling,” Rarity sighed. “I trust you found a place for Sweetie and her friends to rest?”

“Yep!” Pinkie exuberantly said. “I found Discord’s guest room and made sure that there were no eldritch horrors from beyond space and time nearby!”

“Eldritch horrors?” Luna asked apprehensively.

Starlight looked curious. “Beyond space and time?”

Discord actually seemed mildly surprised. “I have a guest room?”

The remaining four Element Bearers all glanced at each other. “It’s Pinkie Pie,” they all said in unison, as if rehearsed. “Don’t question it.”

Pinkie giggled.

“Anyway, Pinkie, ya didn’t miss all that much,” Applejack said as Sunset and Marx entered a building on-screen. “They got one of those star thingies and are lookin’ for the next.”

“I wonder what they’re gonna fight this time!” Rainbow interjected. “Maybe it’ll be a giant squid!”

Applejack raised an eyebrow. “And how d’ya figure that?”

Rainbow shrugged. “Well, they are on an ocean world.”

“I hope they don’t have to fight anything,” Fluttershy whispered. “Just think of all the cute little critters they could meet in an alien ocean!”

This Simirror, Sunset decided, was one of the most annoying inhabitants of this universe she’d encountered thus far. And considering that she had been living in the same building as Dedede, that was quite the accomplishment. Unlike the selfish king, though, whose annoying tendencies were a consequence of his personality, the Simirror they were speaking with had one, incredibly grating trait.

“So, ye be lookin’ fer the Fountain of Dreams, eh?”

His voice.

Still, considering that he was their only lead, she put up with it. Sunset nodded with a fake smile. “We were told you could help.”

“Well, whoever told ye that bit o’ advice knew their way ‘round town,” the Simirror said. He opened a drawer in his desk and drew from it a map. “Whoever built the damned thing wanted ta keep it good an’ hidden. But I still think I’ve found it.” He rolled the map out on top of his desk. “Ye’ve come at a good time. I was just about ta stage an expedition out there meself.”

“And you’ll take us along?” Marx prompted.

The Simirror laughed. “Ye’ll be more crew than I’ve ever gone wit’ afore. But it’ll be good ta have someone watchin’ me back. Ye never know what can happen out at sea.” Using his staff, he pointed at the map, tracing down towards an island. “We set off in fifteen minutes. It’s an hour’s journey ta the island, but I know not where on–or in–the island the Fountain lies. But if we can find it,” he chuckled, “consider me timbers shivered.”

Sunset took a moment to mentally translate that to plain Ponish and nodded. “Just one more thing before we go,” she said, prompting the Simirror to look up at her. “Can you drop the pirate act? I don’t think you even used that last phrase correctly.”

“Oi, that’s me voice yer riffin’ on!” the Simirror tried to counter.

Sunset raised an eyebrow.

He rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he conceded while rolling up the map, “ruin my fun, why don’tcha.”

His map stored, the Simirror got up and made for the door. Marx and Sunset made to follow, and the former opened his mouth as they stepped outside. “By the way, I don’t think we ever actually introduced ourselves,” he mentioned. “I’m Marx, and my equine friend here is Sunset!”

The Simirror glanced at them for a moment before continuing towards the docks. “Call me Sam.”

Sam the Simirror’s ship, while seafaring, seemed somewhat shoddily constructed, at least by Sunset Shimmer’s limited skill at seamareship. The boat was a relatively rickety thing, clearly at least a few decades old. Sam seemed fairly experienced, though; it took only moments for him to untie the ship and push them off the dock.

Well, perhaps “ship” was being generous. The fiberglass construction was little more than a medium-sized motorboat. Which would be fine if their goal was to waterski on a lake, but this was a bit more extreme than that.

With a sputter, the motor started chugging in neutral. Sam let them drift away from the dock a bit before he placed a hand on the throttle. “You two might want to hold on to something!”

Marx glanced at his very distinct lack of arms and raised an eyebrow.

Sunset rolled her eyes and made sure he was telekinetically secured. “You sure this is a good idea, Sam?” She pursed her lips. “This boat seems…I don’t want to say ‘not seaworthy,’ but…”

Sam scoffed. “Please, this baby has served me well for forty years, and she'll do so for another twenty years yet if I have anything to say about it!” He grinned. “Hold on to your hats.”

Without another word, he gunned it.

The motor began whirring with a deafening roar as the boat launched forward. Its bow tilted so far upward that Sunset couldn’t even see in front of it from her position in the passenger seat. Looking behind them, the docks were already naught but a distant image, and absolutely massive wakes spilled out from the stern.

Luckily, at least, it was a clear day with calm waters, so they encountered no waves steep enough to send them flying. Sunset grinned as she felt the wind whipping through her mane and the salty smell of the ocean filled the air. It’d been years since she’d gotten the chance to visit the sea, outside of their battle with the Halberd above Orange Ocean. Really the last time she’d been was…she blinked in surprise and realization. The last time she’d been to the ocean on an actual visit was before she even applied for CSGU.

“So, what’s got you two looking for the Fountain?” Sam shouted over the wind.

“We’re summoning Nova to stop the Sun and Moon from fighting!” Marx shouted back.

Sam glanced upward and nodded. “A noble goal,” he noted.

They rode on in silence after that, and nothing of real note happened for another forty-five minutes. There wasn’t really all that much to discuss, after all, until they did hit a steep enough wave to send them flying. They didn’t spend very long in the air, but it was long enough that Sunset could legitimately feel them being in free fall.

Sunset braced herself against the seat as the boat splashed back down. “God, I hope I remember an air bubble charm,” she said, lighting her horn just in case.

Marx looked at her confusedly. “What would you need that for?”

Sunset grimaced as they hit another wave. “Y’know, in case we capsize or something.”

Marx tilted his head. “You can’t breathe underwater in your home universe?”

“Sunburst?”

“Yeah, Starlight?”

“You’ve overfilled your glass.”

Sunset felt her jaw drop. She tried to articulate some sort of response, but found herself simply sitting there in astonished silence. Her auditory cortex had heard the words perfectly fine and sent them along for processing, but her prefrontal cortex simply refused to accept such a ludicrous possibility as reality.

At least, until they hit yet another wave and she nearly bit off her own tongue. Deciding to mentally table that little tidbit for now, she glared at Sam. “Are you even watching where we’re going?”

Without verbally responding, Sam yanked the wheel to the left. With how fast it was going, the boat drifted a solid forty degrees to face the next wavefront head-on and caught some more airtime. As they crashed back down and Sam corrected their direction, he grunted. “If we take one of those to the side we’re going port over starboard, and I’d prefer not to have to flip my boat back over in the middle of the ocean.”

“What’s even making these waves, anyway?” Marx shouted, looking up at the sky. There were a few clouds visible, but nothing that looked like an incoming storm. Given the size of the planet, though, visibility was limited. The horizon was pretty close–probably only a kilometer or so away–and had a highly pronounced curve. “Doesn’t look like it should be windy.”

After hopping another wave, Sam pointed upward. “Those there are altostratus clouds. There’s a front rolling it, right between us and the Fountain.”

“Shouldn’t we just go around the storm, then?” Sunset inquired.

Sam shook his head. “That could take us hours longer. Best we just charge straight through and hope it holds out long enough for us to get under it.”

The weather, unfortunately, did not hold out for long enough. After a few minutes of crashing through ever-steeper waves, the first raindrop fell while they were still a solid ten minutes from the Fountain’s island. Thirty seconds later, and the storm was fully raging. A massive headwind was buffeting them, drastically slowing down their pace. The storm wasn’t nearly as bad as it was on Floria–that had essentially been hurricane-force winds–but it was still pretty bad. Even heading into the waves optimally, water was sloshing into the boat, which Marx and Sunset were doing their best to bail. Sam, at least, seemed to have been prepared for something like this–there were buckets stored below deck.

The Moon had managed to boot the Sun out of the sky for a bit just as they went under the clouds, too, making it even darker than it already was. A flash of lightning illuminated them as Sunset tossed another bucketful of water out of the boat. After the rumble of thunder passed over them, Sunset opened her mouth. “Still think this’ll be faster than going around?” she shouted.

Sunset couldn’t see Sam’s face clearly under his hat (which she was privately astonished was still on in this wind), but she could still tell that his eyes narrowed. “I’ve been boating my whole life, lassie,” he boasted. “I’ve made it through worse.”

Another flash of lightning, and Marx, who had been looking down at the water at the time, grimaced. “Uh, guys?” he called. “Something below us is moving. And big.”

“There’s a shoal of Squishy that like to swim around this area, but they shouldn’t get too close.” Sam said. He throttled back, letting their speed drop a bit. “There, that shouldn’t aggravate them.”

There was a crunching sound from the stern, and everyone flicked their attention to it just in time to see a massive white tentacle rip the motor clean off. In but a moment, they slowed to a complete standstill, the boat now entirely at the sea’s mercy.

And it didn’t feel very merciful.

“You were saying?” Sunset deadpanned.

Sam got up and grabbed his staff as the abnormally large Squishy began emerging from the water. “What in the world?”

Sunset had seen images of Squishies on their second day in Dreamland, when Twilight had had the three of them chew through every book in Castle Dedede’s library (which the princess had found sorely lacking; they got through it in under two hours). They were eight-tentacled cephalopods, though their bodies seemed more akin to Earth’s and Equus’s squids than their octopi. Usually docile, Squishies, Blippers, and Glunks made up the majority of large animals in Popstar’s oceans. They ranged in size from around Kirby’s height–half a meter or so–but they could grow as large as five meters under the right conditions.

It seemed that Aquarius had those perfect conditions, because the Squishy attacking them had to be at least four meters from its top fin to its arms. And with their (formerly motor)boat being as small as it was and the backdrop of a stormy ocean, it seemed more like the old stories of krakens than any reasonably sized squid. The Squishy did not roar, for it was incapable of doing so. Instead, it just slammed another tentacle down, shattering the boat’s windshield.

Sunset, of course, had the proper reaction to getting attacked by a sea monster.

She screamed “Holy shit!” and started blasting.

Unfortunately, the Squishy didn’t seem particularly hurt by her spur-of-the-moment magical laser. If anything, it only seemed to anger it further. It responded by trying to slam another tentacle down, but this one was actually blocked. With a wave of his staff, Sam summoned a mirror that, defying what little physics Sunset thought she still had a grasp on, sent the attack back. As the Squishy slammed its own tentacle back into its face, Sam kept up the pressure. For a split second, Sunset could see two of him on opposite sides of the boat, before the potentials collapsed into a single image as he teleported closer to his target and sent a stream of mirror shards right into another tentacle.

The Squishy seemed extremely durable, though, powering through the glass and readying another attack. Sunset’s mind flew through the magic she could use against it. Pyroturgy wouldn’t really be useful without completely exhausting herself, cryoturgy would be just as likely to freeze her allies as her target, she was rusty enough at hydroturgy that she didn’t want to chance it, and anything she tried regarding atmoturgy would be lost in the wind. There was, though, one other school of magic she could try here.

“Hey Marx,” she requested, “could you distract it for a bit?”

“On it,” he replied, leaping from his seat near the bow, over the destroyed windshield, and landing close to the stern. “Hey, big guy!” he called, diverting the Squishy’s attention away from Sam. “What’s it like to have nine brains and use none of them?”

Sunset readied a powerful silencing, darkening, and cooling charm and focused on her magic. She would need total concentration if she was going to pull this off.

The school of magic dealing with the manipulation of electromagnetism does not have an official name in this day and age. For the longest time, it was simply called phototurgy, as the earliest wizards to develop it believed it to harness the power of lightning, and nothing more. The name stuck for millenia, until the discovery of electromagnetism forced wizards to consider electroturgy and phototurgy separate schools. That was, until the additional discovery that light was electromagnetic radiation reunified them. And the more recent discovery of the electroweak force threw the official name of the school into flux once again, even if “electroturgy” was still used colloquially.

Regardless, the magic that Sunset was planning on using did have an official name. Electrokinesis was simply the magic that dealt with direct manipulation of charged particles, after all, so the name fit rather well. On a quantum level, this amounted to her magic producing a large number of high-energy photons directed to bombard a specific column of air. These were absorbed by the electrons of the material’s constituent atoms, exciting the particles and tearing them from their corresponding nuclei. In the same instant, Sunset released her silencing, darkening, and cooling charms, as to not deafen, blind, or boil her or her allies.

The air’s conductivity spiked, and the natural built-up charges in the stormcloud and water suddenly had a convenient route through which to equalize. Now free to move, electrons in the cloud hopped from atom to atom, forced in the opposite direction of the electric field as per their very nature. In about three milliseconds, all of the energy stored in the cloud-ocean capacitor was released in the form of heat and light.

In two words: lightning struck.

Panting, Sunset let her charms fall, allowing the group full view of a very damaged Squishy. Despite being hit with around thirty kiloamps of current, it was still alive, though sinking back into the ocean. Clearly it decided that this prey was far too difficult to catch.

Sunset peered over the edge for a moment before turning around with a grin. “Well, that happened. Have any oars we can use to get the rest of the way?”

Sam opened the storage compartment in the boat’s deck. “I definitely should have them in here somewhere.”

As Sunset and Marx watched him rummage around, she felt something wet wrap around her back right hoof. When she looked back, her brain didn’t even have time to register it as a tentacle–one from the Squishy that had just retreated, in fact–before she was pulled backwards with a yelp. Marx and Sam both whirled around in distress, but neither could stop her from being pulled over the edge.

She felt her head hit the side of the boat, and everything went black.

Discord’s living room was pandemonium. That was not an unusual state of affairs for the home of a god of chaos, but this instance was notable in that the chaos was caused by his guests, not him. A series of gasps rang out from the audience the moment Sunset’s cranium impacted the hull, and the sharp sound of shattering glass rang out as Sunburst reflexively dropped his glass of wine.

He didn’t seem to care very much.

Celestia seemed to be channeling centuries of practice in not lashing out as she looked at Discord. “Save them.”

Discord snapped a paw.

Predictably, nothing happened.

“Like I said, there’s nothing I c-”

“Bullshit,” Celestia interrupted, swearing for what must have been the first time in decades.

Rarity fainted. Everypony else looked at the princess, completely shocked. Even Discord was caught off guard. “Listen, Celly, I’ve tried just about everything. Void locked down Its multiverse tight.”

“You are the god of chaos,” Celestia emphasized. “And you claim to have tried everything?”

“Yes.”

In one swift movement, Celestia had whirled around and telekinetically pinned Discord to the wall. “This is the first chance I have had to see Sunset in eight years. I cannot squander it. Surely you can do something.”

Discord shrugged, entirely ignoring the telekinesis and walking forward. “I’m flattered by your assumption of my omnipotence, but it’s quite simple: I’m outclassed.”

“Twilight got through,” Rainbow pointed out. “So unless you’re admitting that she’s more powerful than you…”

Discord guffawed. “Please, more powerful than me? Twiggles breaking through was a cosmic fluke, and you’re all lucky it didn’t destroy the universe in the process.”

Fluttershy let out a squeak of surprise and ducked below the couch as the others all processed that. “That…that was a possibility?” Celestia blanched.

Discord nodded. “Either you got extremely lucky, or there’s something more going on.” In a snap, he teleported everyone back into their seats as Marx sprouted his wings and took off towards Sunset’s unconscious body. “But it’s not something I can do anything about, so all we can do is watch.”

When Sunset came to, the first thing she noticed–before she even opened her eyes–was her pounding headache. Between the mana burn she’d had over the past weeks and the physical trauma, she was really starting to get tired of those. She opened her eyes and her retinas were immediately assaulted by bright sunlight; it seemed that the Sun had once more overtaken the sky. She blinked twice and groaned. With how blurry her vision was, she was definitely concussed.

Feeling around, she could tell that she was on a beach. The sand was warm, but not overly so, and the waves gently lapped around her hooves. Ignoring the pain, she rolled over onto her side, forced herself up, and began casting one of the few self-healing spells she remembered. She hadn’t really had the time to study non-combat blood magic before her falling out with Celestia, but what little she remembered was enough to recover her vision, at least.

Even a licensed blood mage, though, would have difficulty matching the same healing efficiency that this universe’s food offered. Equestrian magic would only be able to replicate the life-saving effects of a maxim tomato if multiple unicorn doctors operated simultaneously. So that was her next target: finding something to eat.

Luckily, there was a palm tree nearby. With only a mild bit of strain, she telekinetically picked a coconut off the plant and ripped off its husk. Apparently it wasn’t fully ripe, given the amount of water that spilled out. Still, there was enough flesh built up that she could eat.

She recoiled a bit at the extremely strong taste. She’d never really cared for coconut, but she was willing to power through it for the healing properties. Besides, she was hungry; she hadn’t eaten breakfast and had spent the past few hours gallivanting around Popstar’s planetary neighbors, after all.

Thankfully, the coconut retained this universe’s quirk of healing food, and her symptoms were abated. Once she was satisfied that she wouldn’t suffer permanent brain damage, she shook the sand out of her mane and looked around. Well then, she thought, this is…not ideal.

The area she was in was just screaming deserted island vibes. A tropical beach, complete with the soft white sands, stretched from the ocean to a few meters inland. From there, the island was covered in grass, save for a smattering of coconut palms. Considering that she couldn’t see any sign of the boat–or Sam or Marx, for that matter–she would have been rather concerned that she would be stuck there.

Would have been, were it not for a constant magical pressure on her horn.

It could have been leftover from the concussion, but Sunset doubted that. Between Popstar’s and Floria’s Fountains, she knew how Fountain magic felt at this point. This had the same underlying feel to it, even if the general vibe the magic was giving off was unique. Aquarius’s Fountain felt like a sunny, tropical day. Smiling, Sunset followed the magical field as it got stronger. Just drifting up onto the Fountain’s island was extraordinarily lucky, but she would take the universe acting in her favor for once.

Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like it was going to be that easy. The magic led her into a large cave, which had nothing in it except a pool of water at the back. Sunset raised an eyebrow at it and trotted closer. The magic seemed like it would be strongest in the water itself, and Sunset recalled what Marx had said earlier about underwater breathing. It seemed ridiculous, but she was out of options. Leaning down so that just her nose was in the water, she sniffed.

She’d been expecting, if subconsciously, for water to flood her sinuses. That was, after all, what usually happened when one breathed water through their nose. In this case, however, she was pleasantly surprised by the fact that she wasn’t inhaling water at all. Instead, it was like she was somehow breathing the dissolved oxygen right out of the water without gills.

Sunset shrugged, mentally cried yolo, and jumped in.

Fortunately, the ability to breath underwater carried on existing below the surface, so she didn’t drown. It was, however, rather dark. With a soft aquamarine glow, the walls became visible. The cave, it seemed, continued on below the surface, so she started swimming.

She had been swimming for a solid five minutes or so, generally moving downward, when she noticed something odd about the cave she was in. Earlier on, it had looked like a completely natural flooded cave, but–she swam over to the wall–this portion of it seemed artificial. It was far too smooth to be a natural formation. As she kept moving, she felt like her suspicions were confirmed. The previously roughly-cylindrical cave now had distinct, right angle corners, and the stonework was increasingly ornate.

Then the cave opened up into a massive, underwater cavern, and Sunset’s jaw dropped.

Along the cavern floor, which was several meters below her, stood a myriad of stone buildings. Some sort of glowing stone illuminated the streets, and Sunset could even see what looked like a market square. There were structures built into the walls, too, presumably accessed by swimming up to them. This wasn’t just some cave with the Fountain, it was a full-on underwater city.

Or at least, it would have been, had it been populated.

Indeed, the entire city seemed abandoned. No one, save for a few curious Blippers, were swimming around the streets. There were no creatures going about their day-to-day lives, no one in the market selling goods. In fact, Sunset noticed as she swam through, the city looked like it had been abandoned for a long time; the stonework on most of the buildings had been eroded away, and thinner portions had crumbled entirely.

The most intriguing of the whole thing was the gaping hole in the cavern’s ceiling. It was shaped like a massive slash, as if some angry god had taken a sword and cleaved directly through the rock. From her position, she could see straight through the slash to the ocean above, which was definitely where the few Blippers had swam through.

Sunset shook her head. She didn’t have time to consider whatever had forced this city’s abandonment; she had a Fountain to find. Following the magic, though, she passed by a building that caught her eye. Or, perhaps more accurately, it caught her horn, for it also had a noticeable magical presence. Whatever magic could survive this long without being maintained had to be extremely powerful–she had to take a look.

Curiously, Sunset swam through a broken window. The hallway reminded her more of a human university than anything, with a row of doors on the interior side. As she followed the magic, she sent out a detection charm–the same one she’d used on the Element of Magic back during her attempted heist. That had to have been what, less than two weeks ago? It felt like it had been much longer, but she supposed that she’d crammed quite a bit into those two weeks.

The detection spell pinged back with what spell was giving off the magic she was following. All it was able to pick up was a simple stasis spell, meant to ward off biological and physical decay. Clearly, someone had wanted to protect whatever was in here. She reached the door the magic was behind within a few moments and, bracing herself, opened it.

She immediately shut it again, her eyes as wide as dinner plates. There was a dead body in there.

She took a few deep breaths to calm herself and tried to keep from vomiting. It wasn’t the first time she’d ever seen a dead body–her grandmother’s funeral came to mind, along with the homeless man she’d found frozen under a bridge on her twelfth night on Earth. And the body was old, the stasis spell had just kept it from decaying and the water from dissolving it. She’d just never seen that much blood before.

Steeling herself, she opened the door again. The room seemed to have once been an office of some kind, but both walls adjacent to the door’s had been destroyed. Violently, if the debris spread across the desk was anything to go by. Several papers–which Sunset assumed had been enchanted to survive in the water–littered the floor near knocked-over filing cabinets. Some part of her mind noticed and catalogued all of that, but most of her attention was on the body.

It was humanoid, but definitely wasn’t human. The only skin she could tell that from was its blue hands; the rest of its torso, arms, and legs was covered by a long white robe. The body’s head just wasn’t there. It had landed just on the edge of the stasis spell, allowing the ocean to claim everything above its shoulders. What had killed it, though, was quite clear: the massive circular hole in its chest, like it had been stabbed straight through with a lance.

That was most of what Sunset could see through the massive cloud of still, bloody water that surrounded the body, but one additional thing caught her eye. In its left hand, the body was holding an open book. She couldn’t quite see what was in it from this angle, but if the pen in the body’s right hand was anything to go by, it was in the process of writing something when it had been killed. Careful to not get any of the blood on it, Sunset grasped the book in her telekinesis, pulled it out into the hallway with her, and shut the door.

Once the door was closed, Sunset sat down hard. That wasn’t physically taxing in any capacity, sure, but mentally it felt inherently wrong to steal straight from a dead being’s hands. But this book seemed like the only thing in there that was worth saving, so clearly that creature had wanted someone to have it.

Looking down at the book, still opened to the page it had been whenever its owner was killed, her suspicions of it being their final words were confirmed. At the bottom of the page was an ink mark running diagonally to the rest of the text and straight off the page from, she assumed, when the being’s arm was jerked back when it was stabbed.

The text, though, was completely foreign to her. Frowning, she flipped back to the beginning to see if the final entry just had horrible handwriting from being hastily written. Alas, the characters were still completely unrecognizable to Sunset. That wasn’t completely unexpected, though. When the Mirror had sent her to Earth, it had given her some sort of proficiency in spoken English, but left her illiterate while on the planet. It had taken her a full two months to learn enough of the written language just to get by.

For a moment, she pondered how, exactly, that might work. Maybe the Mirror absorbed the spoken languages around it and transferred that knowledge to those going through? If, for example, the Mirror had deigned to dump her in Canterlot, Mexico instead of Canterlot, Ohio, would she have known spoken Spanish instead of English? Perhaps something similar was going on here.

Her eyes narrowed. No, that couldn’t quite be it. She’d seen what written Somnic–the language spoken by Dreamlanders–looked like from Bandee. That had sweeping calligraphy akin to something like Arabic or her native Ponish, not whatever blocky text this was. It actually seemed rather similar to the Latin alphabet, albeit with more right angles and rotated letters.

Shrugging, she snapped the book shut and hit it with a storage spell. She’d just ask Marx if he knew anything about it once she’d found him and the Fountain.

The Fountain, as it turned out, wasn’t too far away. It was tucked away near the cavern’s wall, with several of the city’s roads leading right to it. She would have loved nothing more than to swim right up to it, touch the Star Rod, and ride out of there.

Unfortunately, one massive obstacle swam between her and her goal: a very big, very blue, and very aggressive whale.

As soon as it saw her, the whale had let out a bellowing, low call and charged at her. It was ungodly fast for its size, and Sunset was barely able to swim out of the way before it slammed into the building behind her and crushed it to smithereens.

She silently cursed herself as she tried to keep away from the whale’s attacks. She’d never been too big into swimming before, and her slowness was costing her precious chances to attack back with how focused she was on dodging. Much like the Squishy from before, the whale’s blubber was thick enough to absorb any of the magic she threw at it. She was going to have to get creative.

Fire wasn’t an option, and ice wasn’t one either if she didn’t want to freeze herself to death. Air elemental magic wasn’t available for obvious reasons, and using anything electric while she was also under the water was a supremely bad idea. She had to teleport out of the way of another charge and mentally berated herself again. Hydrokinesis would have been an extremely viable option if she was any good at it, but she had been only slightly above average with it back in CSGU and was sure to be rather rusty after eight years of disuse. In some recess of her mind, she made a mental note to fix her crippling overspecializations. The rest of her brain was busy trying to figure out how to take this thing down.

Thankfully, at least, she didn’t have to worry about mana burn with the Fountain so close by, letting her teleport at will. The whale seemed content to charge at her with an open mouth, but she couldn’t just teleport right to the Star Rod and resolve it then and there. If it took too long to get the Warp Star, she’d be her attacker’s lunch.

Instead, she flexed her magical muscles by telekinetically ripping the destroyed building off its foundation. With a shout, she threw the mass of stone through the water, specifically targeting the whale’s eyes. That seemed to work; the whale stopped charging for a moment. It then just redoubled its efforts, though, swimming even faster this time.

Sunset yelped and teleported again, allowing the whale to slam into the ground. Instead of charging again, however, it responded by sending a jet of high-velocity water out from its blowhole, hitting Sunset and slamming her into the cavern wall. It didn’t break anything, but it was still rather painful.

She was barely able to reorient herself and kick off the wall before the whale caught up and slammed full force into her previous position. Its blubber seemed to act almost like a kind of bouncy rubber, ricocheting it back into the open cavern. It couldn’t growl, but Sunset would have sworn that she heard it do so as it looked at her.

Suddenly, a voice echoed out in the cavern from where Sunset had originally entered. “Need any help?”

Sunset teleported out of the way of another charge. Momentarily safe again, she glanced at where Marx’s voice had come from to see him rapidly swimming towards her.

Applejack’s eyes narrowed. “Somethin’s fishy there.”

Pinkie giggled. “Whales aren’t fish, silly! They’re mammals!”

Applejack shook her head exasperatedly. “No, Ah mean ‘bout how Marx only showed back up now. We know he’s been followin’ Sunset, so why’d he decide to help out at just the right moment?”

Rarity, who had recovered from her earlier fainting spell, frowned. “You are correct, Applejack, that does seem rather strange.”

Applejack huffed. “Ah don’t trust him.”

“Where’ve you been?” Sunset asked, throwing the remains of a street lamp at the whale to interrupt another charge.

Marx, despite not having arms, still was able to swim quite a bit faster than her. “Well, after you got dragged off the boat, we lost sight of you pretty quickly. Sam had some emergency oars, though, so we were able to row to the island, at least, but he turned back to go back to town.”

Sunset didn’t have the time to mentally parse through the exact sequence of events, so she just took his explanation at face value. After all, most of her attention was still on the whale, which was charging at them again. “Hey, think you can distract this thing long enough for me to get us a Warp Star out of here?”

Marx grinned. “Oh, absolutely.”

Sunset didn’t verbally respond, instead charging her horn and getting off a double teleport just before the whale would’ve slammed into them. Sunset positioned herself close to the Star Rod, and would’ve been within charging distance of the whale if it wasn’t for where she’d teleported Marx to.

“Hey, Fatty!” Marx taunted from above the whale, forcing it to clumsily turn itself to face him. “Any cake recommendations? You look like you eat a lot of ‘em!”

Sunset didn’t listen for the whale’s reaction, instead reaching out to the Star Rod and praying that it would work in time. One light show later, and a deep blue Warp Star had formed below the fountain, which she eagerly jumped onto.

She sped right towards Marx, snatching him out from the whale’s jaws just before they closed. In a single, swift motion, she tossed him onto the Warp Star as well before changing course and launching out of the cavern through the gash in the ceiling. In naught but a few seconds, they flew out of the ocean floor, out of the water, and out of the atmosphere.

Author's Note

Summoning Stars: 3/8

I absolutely love Kirby lore. I won't be explicitly spelling anything out for a while, but I do quite enjoy pulling together different parts of Kirby's multiverse and setting up for future reveals. This one might be a bit more on the obvious side, though.

For now, though, we leave the mysterious ancient cities of Aquarius behind and shoot for the skies. I hope no one's afraid of heights, because up next we have Chapter Eighteen: Skyhigh, the Center of the Storm.

Chapter XVIII: Skyhigh, the Center of the Storm

Sunset was breathing heavily as she and Marx fled Aquarius. That had been far too close for comfort, and she wasn’t even the one that had been in direct danger. Once they were a considerable distance away from the planet, she decided to check up on that. “You good, Marx?”

Marx blinked. “Hm? Yeah, I’m fine. You could've teleported me if it came to that, right?”

“Probably?” Sunset wagered, unsure. “I’m not sure you’d want to bet your life on it, though.”

Marx took a moment to absorb that. “Eh, I’m sure I’d’ve been fine either way–don’t worry about it too much.” Changing the subject, he continued. “Hey, did anything interesting happen while I was looking for you?”

Sunset frowned and, flaring her horn, retrieved the book. In the light of the Warp Star and outside of the murky depths of Aquarius, she was able to actually get a good look at its cover for the first time. Disappointingly, it wasn’t anything that pointed towards its contents. The book–fittingly for what Sunset assumed was likely a journal of some kind–had no distinct cover. Instead, it was bound in nondescript leather, which Sunset shook a bit to get any leftover water off.

“I found this thing,” she said. “It was in a long-term stasis charm, but uh…” She opened it. “I don’t recognize this language.”

Marx narrowed his eyes and frowned a bit. “I don’t either. It’s definitely not Somnic, that’s for sure. You found it down in that underwater city?”

“Yeah,” Sunset affirmed. “Any ideas on that?”

“Nada,” Marx said. “But we can figure out the archeological significance of that later; we have a Nova to summon first.”

Sunset stored the book again and looked ahead, where they were approaching a new object. Strangely, it looked less like a planet and more like a miniature nebula. It did have a distinct central core, which looked to be about ten or so kilometers in diameter if Sunset was eyeballing it right, but its atmosphere seemed to extend several hundred kilometers outward. The Warp Star started warming up a bit–signaling their reentry–well before she initially expected it to.

“So, what’s this place?” Sunset asked.

“Skyhigh,” Marx answered. “As far as I know, the whole thing’s made of clouds, but only the ones at the center are thick enough to stand on.”

Sunset did some mental math. “So we’ve only got what, sixty square kilometers or so to scan for the Fountain?”

“A lot less, actually,” Marx said. He nodded towards the swirling mass of clouds making up the core, which they were rapidly approaching. It actually reminded Sunset of Venus a little bit, just much smaller and with clouds made of water instead of sulfuric acid. “Those clouds are non-magical, so we’ll be able to pass right through them. The actual walkable surface is only a couple hundred meters across.”

Sunset stopped the Warp Star just above the swirling wisps. This close, it was obvious that they’d be able to pass through. There was a distinct interface between the cloudy region and the open air, but the clouds were barely more than mist. “So, it’s five kilometers down through this onto soft, fluffy clouds?”

“As far as I know,” Marx said.

Sunset grinned. “Good enough for me. Geronimo!”

With that, she plummeted the Warp Star directly into the clouds. Immediately, the temperature dropped considerably. The magic of the Warp Star did protect them from the worst of it, though it left Sunset slightly puzzled. Even accounting for the clouds above them blocking more and more natural light as they descended, the thermodynamics of that shouldn’t have worked out. But whatever magic was holding a large–albeit not quite planet-sized–ball of gas together seemed to make it work anyway.

It allowed for a beautiful sight, at least. This high up, Sunset was able to watch ice crystals form in real time as water froze onto small bits of dust. It was honestly a bit mesmerizing, but she tore her gaze from the phenomenon to focus on getting them close to the center.

They were still quite a ways up when Sunset’s horn started picking up pinpricks of energy from the Fountain. She grinned. If all went well here, this might be the easiest Fountain yet!

Soon enough, the magically-reinforced cloud surface was in sight, though it was beneath a rather thick layer of mist. It was spherical, and the entire thing couldn’t have been more than one hundred meters in radius. The Warp Star disintegrated upon landing, as expected, throwing Sunset and Marx onto the soft surface. The pair tumbled a bit, but were undamaged.

As Sunset pushed herself to her hooves, she considered the magic she was sensing. Skyhigh’s Fountain wasn’t nearly as calming or serene as Popstar’s and Aquarius’s, but it didn’t give off the same wild vibes as Floria’s, either. The best way Sunset could think to describe it was ordered chaos; like the swing of a double pendulum, Skyhigh’s magic felt confined but chaotic all the same.

Marx glanced at her expression as he hopped to his feet. “Feeling for the Fountain?” he asked.

Sunset waved a hoof. “Eh, sort of. I can get a general idea of its direction, but if we want something more exact…” She lit her horn.

The spell she was casting, arcanum revelare, was a rather esoteric piece of magic. It was originally developed as a medical spell to determine the magical field strength within a pony’s body, as to discover potential blockages to mana flow and correct them. In the modern day, that usage had been supplanted by potions and enchanted crystals that achieved the same effect, however.

Outside of a medical context, just about its only use was triangulating the position of a magic source, which was what Sunset was aiming to accomplish. Even there, it was usually beaten out by more efficient, specialized detection spells, and with arcanum revelare’s rather large mana draw and excessive casting time, nopony had ever bothered to devise a more efficient version of it. Unfortunately, Sunset had no specialized spell for the Fountains, so she was forced to use the general-purpose one.

Efficiency, at least, wasn’t exactly a concern for Sunset. This close to a Fountain, she was essentially swimming in ambient mana, so her only limit for spellcasting was how quickly her own body could take it in. They weren’t exactly strapped for time, either, so she didn’t mind the spell’s rather long windup. A novice caster might take ninety seconds to cast arcanum revelare, and the average CSGU graduate could probably do it in sixty. Most experienced wizards didn’t bother to remember the spell, but those that did could usually cast it in twenty seconds. Celestia usually took around ten, and Sunset had seen Twilight cast it in seven seconds to analyze a maxim tomato. Sunset herself was expecting to take twenty-five, maybe thirty seconds, given that she hadn’t tried it in years.

She pulled it off in five.

As the visualization took place–the magical field lines shining an aquamarine in the visible spectrum, the same as her magic–she blinked in surprise. That should not have been that easy. The sheer amount of ambient magic might have sped it up, sure, but she knew that she didn’t have nearly enough internal mana stores to cast such a complex spell that quickly.

Sunset’s face contorted a bit as she considered that, but Marx seemed more interested in the glowing strands of magic than her expression. “What’re these?” he asked.

“Magical field lines,” Sunset explained, taking the opportunity to expand the range of the spell to better estimate their target. Triangulating the Fountain’s exact position might’ve been a bit overkill, but she wanted to make sure of something before they wasted a few minutes scouring the surface for it.

“So do they point towards the Fountain, or…?”

Sunset sighed as she looked around. The field lines all pointed straight out of the cloudy surface at right angles, flowing radially outward into space. “Yeah,” she answered. “But this means that it’s below us.”

Marx looked down at the clouds. “So we just bust through and fall onto it, then?”

Sunset flared her horn before spewing forth from it a great pillar of flame. The fire spilled onto the floor, raising a cloud of steam above it as the water boiled away. It shone a brilliant orange, lasting a full ten seconds until Sunset was confident that that was enough to bust through to the Fountain. She grinned as the flames receded and revealed a perfectly circular hole in the clouds.

It then immediately filled itself back in, fueled by the Fountain’s magic.

Sunset growled. Okay, apparently this required a bit more finesse. She could manage that. She lit her horn again and, this time, focused on heating up the clouds in a ring a few meters in diameter. The clouds within the ring itself boiled away in an instant, and Sunset diverted the resultant steam away with her magic as new clouds formed to replace the old. Her and Marx took the opportunity to hop over the superheated gas, landing on the cut-out circle of clouds.

Oddly, Sunset noted as they jumped, this was a far greater draw on her magic than she had been expecting. She mentally brushed it off, though; the clouds seemed magic resistant, after all.

Their landing spot, unprepared to bear the weight of two beings, was forced downward, finally granting the pair access to the interior of the sphere. As their makeshift elevator descended, it quickly became apparent that Skyhigh’s interior was, while still gaseous, far denser than the outside. Where the surface only held mist, the clouds got denser and denser as they dropped, becoming an outright fog rather quickly.

Unfortunately, it didn’t seem that they could just drop right to the fountain. Their ride drifted downward some ten meters or so, but before long they had landed on yet another layer of clouds. The fog was so thick now that Sunset could barely see two meters in front of her, though thankfully both her and Marx were bright enough colors that they’d be able to see each other just fine. Both of them, though, frowned down at the clouds they were now standing on.

These, too, were different to the layer above. Notably, they were far darker and denser, as if the floor was made of rainclouds. Which, Sunset figured, it might be. They had no idea what was below them, after all.

“Think we can break through this one, too?” Marx asked.

Sunset flared her horn and prepared a spell. It was supposed to do the same thing as above–heat up a ring of cloud enough that it boiled away, and let them ride the center down.

When she executed the spell, though, nothing happened. It didn’t even backfire or blow up in her face like she might’ve expected from a failed cast. The clouds around them stayed just as unblemished, and the fog didn’t even heat up.

Well, there was one thing that Sunset could tell happened. She still felt her mana deplete just the same as if she had successfully cast the spell, but it was accompanied by a tugging sensation at the base of her horn.

She furrowed her brow. It had been a while since her time in CSGU, but she had a feeling she knew what that feeling was supposed to signify. Magic used against somepony didn’t always have a tell for the receiver, especially if the caster was trying for subtlety, but schools like blood magic–bioturgy if you insisted on pedantry–always incited certain physical reactions in the subject. But as for a tugging sensation…

Sunset’s eyes widened.

Mind magic.

She almost mentally cursed herself for letting herself get rusty enough that a foreign entity could enter her mind like that. Psychoturgy was a delicate enough subschool of magic that mental intrusions could usually be turned around at the door with only a modicum of effort, but she had dawdled so long on remembering the tells that whatever was attacking her had already entered her mind. Instead of wasting precious seconds berating herself, she recalled what she had read on combating psychoturgy when it was already in action.

Letting one’s mind go blank seems like the solution at first glance, but attempting such a feat is effectively impossible. It’s kind of like telling someone to not think of pink elephants and then actually expecting them to not think about pink elephants. Once a victim knows that somepony is in their head, it is basically impossible to think about anything else–even if the victim is trained in meditation, some animalistic part of their brain will always be active and responding to the threat.

Instead, licensed psychoturgists generally recommend to play into the intrusion. A mental attacker is usually looking for something specific in a victim’s memories, and once they’re in, all the victim can do is try to redirect whatever memory is being brought up, and potentially trick the attacker into believing that they have what they want.

This, though, didn’t seem to be in the cards for Sunset. She was experiencing these flashes of memory right along with whatever was attacking her, and they seemed effectively random. Snippets of conversations she’d had with Celestia, poking fun at her brother and that friend of his, her mother reading her a bedtime story when she was a filly, ordering a donut, and other random, entirely usual points of her life before she fled to Earth.

She was still trying to puzzle out what, exactly, this mental probe was trying to learn when it spoke directly into her mind.

In Ponish.

To ye who venture the clouds and enter
And seek what lies in the maelstrom’s center
To further pass below these floors
Ye must complete the trials four
The first of rain, of nature’s tears
Ye must find your way to persevere
The second of wind, of nature’s might
Ye must dispel the central blight
The third of lightning, of nature’s wrath
Ye must locate the downward path
But further below the clouds transform
Beware, traveler, the Eye of the Storm

Its message delivered, the foreign entity in Sunset’s mind retreated, leaving her brain once again entirely her own, if quite a bit more confused. Based on Marx’s expression, it had happened to him too and left him similarly bewildered.

A rumble of thunder distracted both of them before they could discuss it, though. Before their very eyes, some of the cloudy floor off to the side sank, forming a staircase downward and allowing them to hear the pitter-patter of rain.

Marx blinked. “Did uh…your life just flash before your eyes as well?”

Sunset nodded. “And I assume you heard an ominous voice warning us too?”

Marx snorted. “Yeah, it sounded like it was trying way too hard to rhyme.”

Sunset chuckled a bit as she and Marx made for the stairs. “The mind magic itself is still pretty concerning, so we’ll have to watch out for that,” she commented. “That can do a lot of damage if you’re not careful, but in this case…” she rolled her eyes. “Who the hell even tries to make ‘eye of the storm’ sound ominous anymore?”

Unbeknownst to either of them, as it was still obscured by the thick fog, the cloud above them blinked.

“Y’all saw that, right?”

Everypony else was a bit too shocked about the cloud blinking to answer Applejack’s question, though Rainbow was the first to break from her stupor. “Yeah. Clouds are not supposed to have eyeballs.”

“Agreed, darlings,” Rarity said with a bit of a shiver.

“Good ta know Ah ain’t just seein’ things, then,” Applejack responded.

The scratching of a pencil on paper diverted everypony’s attention to Discord before they could further that conversation. “Are you taking notes?” Rarity asked incredulously.

“Of course!” Discord exclaimed. “Clouds with eyes! I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of that!

Rainbow let out a low sound that actually sounded a bit like a legitimate growl. “Discord, I swear, if you mess with my clouds again…”

“I’m getting real sick of rain,” Sunset muttered.

The cloudy staircase down to the next level had deposited them in the middle of a thunderstorm. At the very least it wasn’t windy, but the raindrops were still rather cold. Sunset had a warming charm up to counter it, just like she had done on Floria, as she frowned at their surroundings. The clouds on this layer were just as indistinguishable from each other as the ones above, blending together into one big gray mass of water.

“So, any idea what that voice meant by ‘finding our way’?” Marx asked.

Sunset scoffed. “Please, if that was any more vague it’d have been incomprehensible. I think we’ve just gotta wing it.”

“So…split up and look for a way down?” Marx suggested.

Sunset shrugged. “Might as well.” The sphere they were standing on wasn’t very large, after all–this layer had to be a bit over a hundred meters across, at maximum. They would probably be able to hear each other shout from across the entire thing.

The two wandered off, each searching for something to indicate a way down. As Sunset had mentioned, the puzzle that the mental magic had imparted was unhelpfully vague. That–the tendency for magic puzzles to be stupidly vague–was one of the few things she actively preferred about Earth compared to Equus. All of Earth’s major mysteries that she knew about fell into three camps: proven to be undecidable, historical mysteries with solutions lost to time, and mysteries that were actively being worked on. There were no wishy-washy millenia-old prophecies, no cryptic old wizards wanting to sound smarter than they actually were, and no vague messages where the exact wording made everything make sense only after it had all gone down.

Sunset slowed her pace a bit as she thought. Hold on, exact wording! She frowned. Well, that doesn’t really help me. “Ye must find your way to persevere” doesn’t really tell me anything. We already have to find our way, and I’ve definitely been persevering! I mean seriously, I’m not sure how this day could get any w-

She cut off her train of thought, both because she didn’t want to jinx herself, and because her hoof splashed down in a puddle that she hadn’t seen before. Curiously, she peered down at it. The water was nearly perfectly clear, blending into the, well, cloudy-gray color of the clouds beneath it. The ripples on the surface from the raindrops, though, were completely visible. Humming to herself in thought, she poked at the material the puddle was sitting on.

Instead of the soft and slightly squishy material of the rest of the magical clouds, this felt more akin to cloudcrete, the building material pegasi used to keep cities like Cloudsdale and Las Pegasus stable. She supposed it made sense–the water’d just get absorbed back into or disperse regular clouds, but cloudcrete could maintain a limited amount of liquid water on its surface.

Sunset’s frown deepened as she looked closer at the water, a raindrop dripping off of her nose and splashing down. Carefully, she looked at the ripples as they spread outward, highlighting the water’s true shape. This wasn’t just a puddle, it was a thin line of water extending in either direction, and Sunset couldn’t quite see where it ended.

“Hey, Marx!” she shouted. “I think I found something!”

Marx bounded over the horizon a few seconds later, skidding to a stop right next to Sunset. He blinked and looked down at what she’d found. “A puddle?”

Sunset waved a hoof in a so-so motion. “Sort of. I want to check if it wraps around the whole thing. Could you stay here to act as a landmark?”

Marx nodded. “Okay!” he affirmed.

Sunset smiled. “Thanks.”

It didn’t take her long to circle the entire sphere of clouds at a light canter, and she was back at Marx’s position in a bit over half a minute. A bit around the circle, though, she had encountered an oddity, which was apparent on her face when she returned.

“Found something?” Marx asked.

Sunset nodded, gesturing for him to follow. The two made their way down the line a bit before Sunset stopped, pointing down at the line of water.

Branching off from the main, circular path was a jagged zig-zag of perpendicular line segments. It was difficult to see in the weather, but clearly the lines of water had multiple branches.

“You think that this has to do with ‘finding our way?’” Marx asked.

“Possibly,” Sunset considered. “It can’t hurt to follow it.”

And follow it they did. The zig-zag led them to another line, latitudinally parallel to the last. It also circled the entire surface, and just under halfway around this, too, had a zig-zagging pattern leading to an even tighter circle. The pair continued exploring the odd pattern, encountering tighter and tighter concentric circles, each with varying symbols between them. At the very center of the pattern was a five-pointed star of water, no deeper than the rest of the intricate cloudcrete in the floor, but far more prominent.

Marx looked at it curiously. “So uh, any ideas?”

Sunset narrowed her eyes. Lighting her horn, she summoned an illusion. Streaks of aquamarine light floated in the air, shimmering brightly enough to shine through the thick rain. The magic traced out a distinct pattern: a five-pointed star in the middle, surrounded by five circles. The innermost circle was bare, while the second tightest had a strange, pointed pattern jutting out from it. From the third circle a helix-like spiral arose, and the outermost three circles all had that staircase-shaped zig-zag connecting them.

The orange unicorn grinned. “It’s a map.”

Marx squinted a bit and tilted his head (or at least as much as a sphere with feet could do so). “I can sorta see it. But the map’s a circle,” he pointed out, “and we’re on a sphere.”

Sunset shrugged. “Sure, but a circle is just the cross section of a sphere! And you only need three points to define a plane.” She pointed to the center of the map. “In our case, the Fountain,” she pointed to the first staircase pattern, “the entrance, and…”

Her horn shone brighter as she cast a dispellment charm. She winced a bit–there was a bit more magical feedback than she had been expecting. Dispelling a charm usually took an amount of magic proportional to what had gone into it in the first place, and apparently whoever had constructed the faux-cloudcrete had wanted it to stay. Still, it accomplished the desired effect, and the star-shaped puddle quickly bored through the now entirely-regular cloud.

Sunset grinned again as she finished her speech. “...the exi-”

She was cut off, though, as the water exploded back out of the hole accompanied by screaming winds, splashing both her and Marx across the face. The rain coming close to them, caught up in the air currents, turned nearly horizontal and pelted against them.

The two glanced at each other and, through some silent agreement, pushed forward against the wind and down a level.

Sunset’s mane whipped around her as she and Marx descended the staircase to the next level. The wind screamed in her ears, getting ever-louder the closer they got to the cloudy floor. Honestly, she was rather surprised that they hadn’t been forced off of the staircase by this point–it had no railings.

The source of the extreme winds was obvious: just over the horizon (which for a sphere of this size was under ten meters away), stretching from the ceiling above them to where Sunset presumed was the floor, was a massive funnel cloud. Hailstones whirled around in the air, flung about every which way by the storm.

As the two reached the bottom of the stairs, Sunset yelped a bit and ducked to avoid a golf ball-sized hailstone that had been launched in their direction. Still, she couldn’t help but chuckle a bit. “I was right!” she shouted.

Marx raised an eyebrow at her. “About it being a map?”

Sunset grinned. “Yep!” She held her hoof out and pointed at the tornado. “And I betcha that’s that ‘central blight’ we’re supposed to dispel.”

Marx blinked. “Not to be a stick in the mud but,” he gestured as much as a being without arms could, “how?”

Sunset’s triumphant grin fell from her face. “Well, tornadoes form because of a temperature imbalance, right?” she spitballed. “So I guess I could heat up the air above it to equalize that?”

“That’s definitely not a normal tornado, though,” Marx countered. “The legends about Nova are at least two thousand years old, and I’m pretty sure tornadoes don’t usually last for millenia.”

Sunset sighed, not that she figured Marx could even hear it over the wind. “Fair enough.” She winced as another hailstone whizzed over their heads. “We might want to get rid of it quickly, though; I think that one was bigger than the last.”

“Can’t you do something magicky?” Marx asked.

Sunset rolled her eyes. “Oh sure, get the magical unicorn from another dimension to do everything,” she griped.

Marx raised his eyebrow further, which frankly was rather impressive at this point. “So you’re saying you can’t dispel it?”

Sunset grumbled a bit and lit her horn and they began moving towards the cyclone. “I mean I can, but I’m no good at atmoturgy,” she explained. “It and hydroturgy were always my weakest schools of magic back in school.”

“And I take it that you’re best at fire magic?” Marx asked.

“Pyroturgy, yeah” Sunset elaborated. “Really I’m great at thermoturgy in general, phototurgy, too.” She raised her voice as the winds picked up even more and erected a shield, deflecting another hailstone. “But atmoturgy requires directly influencing a gas, which I never really saw the point in practicing if I could just set something else on fire or freeze the gas for better control of it.”

“Could you do that for the tornado, then?” Marx suggested. “Freeze it?”

Sunset shook her head. “Performing cryoturgy on this scale just isn’t in the cards for me, even with the power boost the Fountains’ve been giving me.”

“So what are you doing, then?” Marx inquired, pointedly looking at her lit horn.

“A general-purpose dispellment charm, like what I used to take out the cloudcrete in the rain,” Sunset explained. “Actual atmoturgists would be able to do it easier, but the best I can do is brute force it and rely on the Fountain’s power to stave off mana burn.”

“So…how long will that take?” Marx asked as another, even larger hailstone impacted the shield.

Sunset sharply inhaled as she felt a stab of pain from her horn, but immediately the wind began dying down. “Not long. We’re thirty meters from the Fountain, tops, so it’s been feeding into my mana almost as fast as I can deplete it.” The hail, at this point, had stopped flying every which way as the wind-speeds dropped from tornadic to simply hurricane-force.

The funnel cloud’s collapse was rather quick. The twenty-meter tall vortex destabilized mere moments after the spells keeping it up did. Without the magic constantly supplying angular momentum and no temperature disparity, the air very quickly bled off its rotational energy and the cloud dispersed, revealing a hole in the floor.

The hailstones, no longer supported by the wind, clattered to the floor as a cacophonous roar of thunder rumbled up from the new hole. Sunset trotted over and looked down through it. “Well,” she said, rather appreciative of not having to shout for once, “looks like we’ll have to jump.”

The floor below–about ten meters down–was a far darker color than the one they were currently standing on. That itself wasn’t the issue. She’d made larger jumps before, like the one onto the Halberd’s deck, but the actual state of the lower floor was concerning. Lightning visibly streaked across it, dancing within the cloud itself.

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Marx asked, having joined her in looking through the hole.

Sunset cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t think we have any other options.” Lighting her horn, she cast a cushioning charm and prepared another Faraneigh cage. “This is gonna be a strain on my magic though, even this close to the Fountain. We’ll have to get through it quick.”

Marx frowned. “Will the map help?”

Sunset summoned the illusory circles again. “Assuming that the spiral was the tornado and it all falls on the same plane,” she pointed at the lightning-like pattern attached to the second circle, “the exit should be pretty close.” She glanced back at Marx. “Ready?”

At Marx’s nod, Sunset levitated him onto her back, cast the Faraneigh cage she’d been preparing, and jumped.

Sunset had been expecting it to be bad, for lightning to be jumping from floor to ceiling and ceiling to floor, for her magic to be constantly strained, and for the thunder to be loud enough to nearly deafen them. She had prepared accordingly, keeping their conducting shield around them and focusing as much power as she could just on keeping them alive so she didn’t waste any. She had thought that was adequate.

Apparently not.

The moment they landed Sunset had to severely adjust her strategy. Her noise-dampening shield saved them from deafness and the Faraneigh cage was enough to stop them from getting fried alive by the current, but the air itself was charged enough to cause problems. It was straining her magic something fierce, but she needed some sort of stopgap, and fast–breathing in ionized oxygen would make for a very quick (and very painful) death. She didn’t have the time nor the knowledge of Marx’s anatomy to use bioturgy as a solution, so she restored to making a crude thaumoelectrochemical alteration to her Faraneigh cage–the cage itself would use the spare electrons running through it to undo the ionization in the air passing through it.

Of course, doing that took work. Even being closer to the Fountain, whatever cloud layers were below them seemed to be blocking most of its restorative effects, so Sunset estimated that she’d only be able to keep it up for a few minutes at most. They needed to move.

She took only a second to orient herself before she began sprinting towards where the lightning symbol corresponded to. Some small part of her vaguely registered Marx’s shout of surprise at her sudden action, but the rest of her was far too concerned with pure survival to bother caring about the specifics.

On this small of a sphere, the horizon was only about six meters away by Sunset’s reckoning, and they reached the approximate location of their goal in only a few seconds. Sunset stopped short as they reached it, panting a bit, but otherwise quite glad to have averted disaster.

Unfortunately, the only thing there was a long copper rod. In another situation, it might’ve been inconspicuous. Like a wire manufacturing plant. That would be just about the only situation though, given that the thing was a cylinder over three meters long and a solid five centimeters in radius. At least, that was around what Sunset was estimating–the constant electrical connection between it and the ceiling was obscuring most of it from view with the glow.

Dully, the rational part of Sunset’s mind began catching up with the rest of her panic-riddled brain. Clearly the rod had to have some kind of use, given that it was there. What that purpose was, though, was a bit tough to think of through the ringing in her ears. Ringing that she was finally beginning to register as Marx’s voice.

“Sun-shim!” he shouted. Based on the exasperation in his voice it was far from the first time he’d called her name in the past few seconds. Her ears perking up in recognition seemed to be enough to let him know that she was listening, though. “You good?”

Sunset took a deep breath and winced as she felt the phantom pressure on her horn flare up. “Yeah, but not for long,” she answered. “We’ve got about ten minutes.”

She couldn’t see his face, but she could still tell he was disconcerted by that. “I take it that we die after those ten minutes expire?”

“If we can’t figure this out, yeah,” Sunset bluntly replied. “Any ideas?”

“Well, the voice up top said something about a downward path, right?” Marx wagered. “Maybe it has something to do with the electricity?”

Sunset stared at the copper for a bit before a grin crossed her face. “Marx, you’re a genius.”

“I am?”

“Something has to be forcing a voltage difference between the clouds here, or else there wouldn’t be current!” Sunset realized. Sparing what magic she could, she grasped the metal in her telekinesis. She had to avert her eyes from it as she did, since the electricity jumping between the ceiling and it (and it and the floor) was far too bright to look at.

Idly, part of her noted that the copper had to have a permanent cooling charm on it; the energy output of the current probably would have vaporized it by now otherwise. That, though, was besides the point at the moment. “Air’s a dielectric, so most of the current is gonna discharge through this.” Carefully, she maneuvered the copper to the side, far enough away that it wouldn’t burn them to death. “So we just need to find wherever that emf source is short out the circuit!”

“Huh?” Marx asked.

Sunset sighed. “We need to connect the floor to the ceiling with the copper. That’ll short the circuit and buy us some time.”

Marx hummed in thought. “Seems a bit short for that. You’d need three of ‘em to actually reach the ceiling.”

“That’s why I think the puzzle mentioned a ‘downward path,’” Sunset said. Glancing around, she began trotting in the direction that the floor-to-ceiling lightning was fiercest. “I think it means the point at which electric potential is the lowest, since that’s where electrons flow from!” Her speech paused for a moment. “Well, at least in direct current. If it’s alternating the actual direction of the current will flip every so often, but there’s still an electric field and thus a ‘downward path.’”

“You uh, know a lot about electricity, huh?” Marx noted after a few moments of walking.

“Just the basics, really,” Sunset admitted. “I only really took the science classes that helped out with the magic I wanted to learn. So I have surface level knowledge of anatomy, chemistry, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, solid state physics, that sort of stuff.”

“That just sounds like a physics degree,” Marx deadpanned.

Sunset blushed a bit. “I mean, wizardry is a field of physics, and those tend to be inherently interdisciplinary with each other.” She thought for a moment. “Granted, Celestia had me take classes in a lot of the social sciences as well; I think she wanted me in some sort of government position once I graduated.”

“Sounds like she wanted to waste all that knowledge in that head of yours,” Marx added.

Sunset snorted, but she caught sight of something before she could reply. Grinning, she rushed forward to make sure it was what she thought. Spiking from the floor and ceiling were a stalagmite and stalactite of cloud, electricity constantly arcing between them. Next to it was an opaque column of what Sunset could only assume was pure magic, handling all of the mechanics of keeping this insane circuit going.

“Here goes nothing,” she said. Carefully, she inserted the copper rod between the two cloud structures, praying that her hunch was right.

It was.

Nearly instantly, the dull roar of thunder that had constantly permeated the air around them, even through the shield, ceased. The copper itself was positively glowing–even with its miniscule resistance, the cooling charm had to work overtime to bleed off the excess heat the current generated. But the insertion of a far better conductor than air proved fruitful, as it had localized the current and the excess charges in the rest of the cloud equalized.

Cautiously, Sunset let the Faraneigh cage drop as she felt the strain on her magic decrease dramatically. When they weren’t instantly fried, she let out a relieved sigh. “It worked!”

“So what now?” Marx asked.

Sunset frowned. “I’m…not sure. All the other ways down revealed themselves after solving the puzzle, though, so I bet this one is close by!”

She was proven right very quickly as the floor beneath them suddenly vanished.

Sunset only had around a second to process what had happened before they hit the cloudy level below them, but that was enough to cast another cushioning charm and save them from a potentially nasty fall. Even with what Sunset assumed was next to no mass below them (unless whoever had left the Fountains made Skyhigh out of neutronium or something) they were still experiencing Earth-like gravity, and a ten-meter fall, even onto cloud, would still cause some damage.

Sunset groaned a bit as she picked herself up. That cushioning charm had been hastily cast and the fall had still hurt. Marx had fallen only a small ways away from her, and seemed to be in similar condition. Glancing around, she tried to puzzle out what seemed to be their final challenge before the Fountain.

The sphere they were on now had to be twenty meters across at absolute maximum. The horizon curved away far too quickly for it to be any larger. In stark contrast to the layer above, this one was composed entirely of the kind of fluffy, white clouds one only ever sees in fiction. Even the ceiling above them had lost its dark coloration.

Unfortunately, that had been replaced by a single, rather terrifying element.

“Hey Marx,” Sunset broached, “do the clouds in this universe usually have eyes?”

Indeed, embedded in the ceiling was a single, massive eye. Sunset watched on as the entire ceiling began to shake, the surface pooling in on itself to become a similar shape to a child’s interpretation of a cloud with an eye in the middle. What was once the copper rod they had used had been broken up and rearranged, becoming several copper spikes sticking out of the being.

“What’s Kracko doing here?” Marx asked in a perplexed tone.

“Kracko?” Sunset asked. Vaguely, she recalled that Dedede had sent one of the Star Rod’s fragments to a ‘Kracko.’ This was that being?

“A cloud-based creature that likes to hang around Popstar sometimes,” Marx explained. “No one knows where it comes from or why it does what it does, and it doesn’t seem to be very talkative.”

There was a rumbling noise, very similar to that of thunder, and Sunset felt her ears involuntarily flatten against her head. “Think this is that Eye of the Storm, then?”

Marx stepped back a bit. “So it would seem.”

With the crackling of electricity, the tips of Kracko’s spikes began to spark. Sunset’s eyes widened in realization with just barely enough time to save herself, as she threw up a shield just in time to stop the full force of the previous floor’s lightning bearing down on her.

She screamed as her horn flared ever brighter and she felt like her head was splitting open from the strain. She heard something pop, and everything went black.

Marx frowned at Sunset’s limp body as it flopped to the floor. She was still breathing, thankfully–he still needed her to activate the Fountains, and he wasn’t very keen on getting stuck on Skyhigh. Still, this was far from ideal. Sunset was his muscle until he could get his nonexistent hands on Nova’s power, but it seemed like he would have to take care of this himself.

“Well that was a bit rude,” he called up to Kracko. “It’s generally considered impolite to introduce yourself with attempted murder!”

He wasn’t entirely sure if Kracko had nerves that he could get on, but annoying his enemies into defeating themselves was his specialty. Anything to help his chances against this.

Marx grinned and spread his wings, the magical, metallic structures flaring outward. It had been far too long since he’d had a chance to actually fight something himself.

With a powerful downward flap, Marx launched himself into the air, hovering roughly equal to Kracko. The cloud responded with a lightning barrage, forcing Marx to duck and weave to avoid being struck as he approached. Fortunately, even with him rarely using his wings, he was just as agile as ever.

His wings were an interesting case. They weren’t natural–his species, as far as he knew, were incapable of flight. No, he had obtained them a few years back during his quest for ultimate power. Halfway around Popstar and inspired by a quarrel he’d gotten into with a mouse, he’d designed the wings himself. It had taken him weeks using all of what he knew about magic, but with the Fountain’s healing he fully integrated them into his body.

Kracko was close now, and the spot Marx was targeting–its eye–was ripe for a high-speed kick. Unfortunately, Kracko saw it coming and drifted upward a bit, and Marx ineffectually kicked its cloudy body instead. The sound of more electricity charging up on top of it forced him to retreat.

He rocketed back down towards the ground, but apparently Kracko wanted a closer shot. The cloud followed him relentlessly, scraping up a few stray bits of cloud off the floor in the process as Marx circled the sphere. Shifting his strategy a bit, Marx pulled up, circling above Kracko and baiting it to fire.

The bolt of lightning was half a meter wide and blew a hole in the ceiling far above them, though that hole was closing abnormally slowly. Marx only spared a moment to look up at it, but it was enough for an idea to form.

He quickly flew back around the sphere to where Sunset’s unconscious body was laying. Gathering up the loose bits of cloud Kracko had released from the floor, he formed himself a ball to bounce on and grinned up at the approaching cloud. “You call that lightning?” he taunted. “I’ve seen worse shocks from a doorknob!”

Not his best quip, he’d admit, but it was enough to enrage Kracko. And that was all he needed.

This lightning bolt was wider than the last and certainly more powerful, which was all the better in Marx’s eyes. He dodged it, nimbly rolling away, and as soon as it impacted the cloudy floor the entire thing seemed to just go poof. The vast majority of the innermost sphere of Skyhigh had been vaporized.

That finally revealed their prize: the planet’s Fountain of Dreams. It sat on a small, irregularly shaped rock, lazily spinning about some axis. Marx, his wings still spread wide, rocketed over to Sunset’s falling body and chucked her directly into the Fountain’s waters.

He landed on the rim shortly thereafter, retracting his wings just in time for Sunset, who was back to full consciousness, to breach the surface and inhale. “Wha-” she started.

“No time to explain,” Marx cut her off, happy to note the aquamarine sparks jumping from the water to her horn. “Can you blast it?”

Her eyes, which were beginning to glow the same color as her magic, flicked to Kracko, who was still above them and still charging up another lightning blast. Naught but a moment later, it released it.

This one, however, was met halfway by one of Sunset’s own magical lasers, halting it midair and pushing it back. She seemed completely serene, her mane even beginning to flow as she channeled the Fountain’s power into her beam. Time seemed to slow as Marx watched the two blasts of pure power connect, and after what felt like an eternity, Sunset’s won out. The aquamarine blast completely overtook Kracko, blasting away most of its cloud and leaving it a floating eyeball with a few cloudy remnants spiraling around it.

It took the smart route and promptly retreated, phasing back into the upper ceiling.

Sunset panted as her mane and eyes returned to normal and the glow of her horn subsided. Still, she grinned and practically leapt up to the Star Rod, summoning their next Warp Star.

Where Popstar’s was yellow, Floria’s green, and Aquarius’s blue, Skyhigh’s Warp Star was a cloudy white, fitting for its planet of origin. Still giddily smiling, Sunset hopped on. “Ready to go?”

Marx grinned back. “Of course.”

A few moments after smashing through the three cloud layers left, they were back in space.

Author's Note

Summoning Stars: 4/8

I HAVE RETURNED! It only took me...three months, but hey, I finally pushed another chapter out. My junior year of uni has been something, that's for sure, and on top of that I had to rewrite this chapter something like four times because I just could not get it to come out in such a way that I was happy with it. I think this final product is decent enough, though.

Regardless of my excuses for my lack of writing recently, I do have some good news: the Hotbeat chapter is entirely complete (that'll be posted next Saturday at 5PM EDT, exactly a week from now), and the Cavius chapter is nearly done. I do have the entire rest of MWW outlined and ready to write as well--I just need to flesh out the dialogue and scenery more. A lot more, for some chapters, but I should finally have the time for it. Finals are in a few weeks, which means that homework, which is where most of my free time gets eaten up in regards to school, is about to end, and I can write between studying sessions.

It's great to be back, and I hope you stay tuned for chapter nineteen: Hotbeat, the Volcanic Venture.

Chapter XIX: Hotbeat, the Volcanic Venture

Once again, Discord’s living room was terribly, awfully, un-chaotically quiet. Nopony dared say a thing, lest they call attention to what had just played out on screen.

Oh, and Fluttershy was still cowering behind her mane.

He could not let this injustice stand.

“Well,” Discord said as mockingly as possible, “that just happened.”

At the very least, his horrid cliché shocked everypony else into actually speaking. Or growling, in Applejack’s case. “So the varmint is hiding something! That ain’t shyness!”

“I am inclined to agree,” Rarity added. “Marx’s actions have been highly suspect.”

“Maybe he’s just…saving them for a surprise…?” Pinkie tried, but she sounded entirely unsure of herself.

“You’ve gotta face it, Pinkie,” Rainbow said. “Trusting Marx looks like it’s a mistake.”

“Which seems rather strange that it happened to begin with,” Luna threw in her two bits. “I did not take Miss Shimmer to be the trusting type.”

Celestia, who had recovered from the minor anxiety attack Sunset’s unconsciousness had given her, frowned. “She isn’t. This seems almost unlike her.”

Discord popped a clawful of popcorn in his mouth and chewed loudly. “Well, I didn’t record that conversation, but Marx does seem to have built up a rapport with her!” he mentioned.

“How so?” Celestia asked.

“Oh, well it’s rather simple!” Discord elaborated, “He’s homeless, she was homeless for the better part of a decade, and he played right into those pity points!”

Celestia winced at the mention of Sunset’s living situation, but Sunburst spoke before she could. “Sunset always did have a soft spot for those scorned by society.”

Rainbow scoffed. “Color me doubtful on that one.”

“No, She really did,” Starlight affirmed. “Hay, her feeling bad for me is the whole reason Sunburst and I met!”

“Well, it quite sounds like there’s a story there,” Rarity noted.

Starlight shrugged. “I mean, it isn’t that riveting of a story,” she said. “Sunset just found me sulking in the corner of the library when I was around four or five and apparently decided that Sunburst needed a reading buddy his own age.” She paused. “Though, thinking of that, she might’ve just been trying to get out of watching him.”

Sunburst shook his head. “No, I really think it was just that; she really loved cultivating my love of reading,” he rebutted, his gaze seeming to unfocus from the screen. He smiled a bit wistfully. “I remember once, when I was six, she let me read a YA novel series she’d just finished since I’d read pretty much everything the library had in my age range.” He chuckled. “My parents were not fans of that when they found out, since the content was quite a bit too mature for a six-year-old to read.”

Celestia joined him in wistful thoughts of the past. “Understanding what exactly counted as appropriate reading material never was one of Sunset’s strong suits. The number of times I caught her sneaking into the Royal Archives…”

Sunburst sniffled a bit. “She used to read to me all the time when I was little, too,” he added. “She started isolating herself more when our grandmother died, though.”

Everypony stayed silent for a bit, not entirely sure how to respond to that, though Starlight did place a comforting foreleg around Sunburst’s shoulders. Applejack opened her mouth, eventually–probably to relate–but was interrupted.

Loudly, Discord clapped. “Well, I think that’s enough sap for today!” he declared, reaching down into his popcorn bag, pulling out a donut, and taking a bite out of it that crunched like a chip. “Looks like the two of them are getting to their next planet, and my word that is a lot of lava!”

“You said this place was called Hotbeat?” Sunset asked as they approached their next planet.

“Yep!” Marx declared. Even from this distance, they could see the volcanic activity, a solid fifth of the planet’s surface covered in an ocean of lava. “A fitting name, right?”

More than anything else, it reminded Sunset of the pictures humans had taken of Io, albeit quite a bit smaller–Hotbeat couldn’t have been much larger than Ceres. The planet’s surface that wasn’t covered in lava was a sulfur yellow, pocked with volcanic craters. Other than the massive lava lake, there were numerous rivers of molten rock criss-crossing the surface and a single giant dome volcano around the size of Olympus Mons, if Sunset was judging the sizes and distances right. Unlike the Martian volcano, though, this was clearly active and feeding into the planet’s lava lake.

Their Warp Star protected them as they entered the atmosphere, as usual, but Sunset had to apply an additional cooling charm as they approached. The surface was so unbearably hot that even a few kilometers up and with the Warp Star’s protection, additional cooling was necessary. “We’re gonna have to be as careful as possible to stay on the Warp Star,” she said. “If this thing breaks the air’s gonna boil us alive.”

“You can’t counter that?” Marx asked.

Sunset gave him a flat look. “Fresh lava is usually upwards of a thousand degrees, and there’s a lot of it down there. I can put as much power into a cooling charm as I want, but that energy is going to diffuse into the charm faster than I can chuck it out unless we have the Warp Star’s additional protections.”

Marx glanced at the yellow ground. “So, we’ve gotta hope that the Fountain isn’t in a cave or something?”

Sunset pursed her lips and looked pointedly at the giant mountain they were approaching. “Yeah. Except knowing our luck, it’s either in that volcano or under the lava lake.”

“Can’t you do that thing with the field lines to locate it?” Marx asked.

Sunset shook her head. “That only works if it’s close by and the strongest magic source in the area; if I cast that spell here it’d probably just pick up on mine or the Warp Star’s field lines.”

“Damn,” Marx said. “I guess the easy solution’s out.”

“Unfortunately,” Sunset agreed. “But logically, whoever made the Fountain would want to be able to access it, right?”

Marx shrugged as much as something without arms could. Which was to say, he bobbed up and down a bit. “Probably. Popstar’s and Floria’s were out in the open, they had a whole city by Aquarius’s, and Skyhigh’s was the only one that was really guarded.”

Sunset nodded. “Right, and Skyhigh probably isn’t natural, anyway, so those protections were definitely on purpose.” She grinned. “So they probably didn’t put Hotbeat’s Fountain under half a kilometer of lava.”

“That does mean that we need to navigate a Warp Star through a cave, though,” Marx pointed out.

Sunset sighed. “Better that than diving through molten rock.”

It took a bit more scouting around on the Warp Star, but near the summit they found exactly what they were looking for: a large cavernous opening in the side of the mountain. Marx, rather unlike him, actually looked concerned.

“You sure we can make it through?” he asked. “Your landings on Floria and Aquarius haven’t exactly instilled me with the most confidence.”

Sunset took a deep breath and focused. “I can do this,” she said.

She was among the best mages of her generation. She had survived eight years on Earth with nothing to her name but the clothes the Mirror had placed on her back. She had lived through two different fights with Kirby, and faced a being straight out of a nightmare. She had survived everything this crazy-ass universe had thrown at her so far, and she wasn’t about to be stopped by a cave.

Furrowing her brow, Sunset steeled her expression. “I can do this,” she repeated.

Their Warp Star launched forward, and they plunged into darkness.

Unfortunately, the initial wideness of the cave’s mouth did not last for very long. Only a scant few hundred meters in, and the cave had closed to being only a few meters wide, forcing Sunset to take it very slow on her maneuvering. On top of that, the cave generally had been curving downward, blocking off light from the outside and making the Warp Star their only source of illumination. Of course, it wasn’t all bad–the Fountain was stored deep within the volcano, Sunset was sure.

Unfortunately, the deeper in the mountain they ventured, the hotter it got and the more energy Sunset had to expend on a cooling charm. It was still uncomfortably warm, though; Sunset could only do so much, even with the Warp Star’s own protections. It was annoying, but she knew if she took it any faster they’d slam into the cave wall and meet a rather grisly end.

So, slow it was. They inched ever forward, what meager light the Warp Star provided enough to barely see that they weren’t about to slam into something. After a few minutes of that mindlessly meandering forward, however, they came across an actual split in the path. One cave, to the left, had a soft glow emanating from further down. On the right, the cave seemed to sharply curve downward, deeper into the mountain.

“So, left or right?” Sunset wondered aloud.

“The left path looks shorter,” Marx pointed out. “Or at least it has something in it if it’s glowing. Want to check that one first?”

Sunset shrugged. “Good enough for me. Plus, just in case, you know what they say about mazes!”

“Stick to the left wall?” Marx asked.

“Yep!” Sunset confirmed, piloting their ride down the left path.

“That only works for mazes that don’t have loops in them, though,” Marx retorted.

“Sure, but this is a cave,” Sunset fired back. “Probably an old lava tube, at that. Even if it splits off from the main branch, the chances of a flow like that recombining before it breaches the surface are pretty slim.”

“Fair enough,” Marx admitted, glancing around. The glow seemed to have been from some magma that had forced its way into the cave, and Sunset’s horn glowed a bit brighter at the increased heat. Sunset frowned a bit as the magma’s glow got bright enough to see by–this path seemed to simply end in a pretty sizable pool of the stuff. This volcano was clearly active; they had seen that much from the outside. So why was there so much still magma in here, a presumably exhausted lava tube?

“Hey, Sunset?” Marx asked, his voice tinged with sudden concern. “You said lava flows don’t usually reconnect, right?”

“Yeah,” Sunset replied. “What of it?”

“So why did the cave only have one exit?”

There was a beat of silence as both of them realized the implications of that. “Skyhigh’s Fountain was well-protected…” Sunset realized.

The ground rumbling cut off further conversation, as the pool of magma suddenly erupted into a geyser. It spiraled around, coalescing into an indistinct blob that still managed to hold itself upright. An arm of molten rock shot out of it, impacting the cave’s wall with a thud.

“It’s a lava golem!” Marx shouted. “Think we could take it?”

Sunset winced as she felt the pressure on her horn increase as the temperature spiked. She opened her mouth to answer, but was interrupted by a terrible shattering sound as the golem tore a boulder from the wall, preparing to hurl it in their general direction.

Both Sunset’s and Marx’s eyes widened. “All in favor of retreating?” Sunset asked.

“Aye,” Marx confirmed.

“Aye,” Sunset repeated.

The lava monster roared in defiance, and another geyser of magma exploded out of the pool, the level of which was very quickly rising.

“The ayes have it,” Sunset declared.

She whirled the Warp Star around and, as fast as she could manage without slamming into the wall, sped down the way they’d come. The golem was after them, Sunset could tell without even looking back. The temperature was still unnaturally high.

Marx, it seemed, was looking back. “It’s gaining on us!” he shouted in alarm. “Can you do anything to slow it down?”

The cave itself shuddered under the strain of so much new magma pouring through it, some even rushing ahead of the Warp Star across the floor. Sunset could hear even more rock torn from the walls, and could only be thankful that the golem’s shots were going wide, rocks pelting the ground in front of them. That gave her an idea, though, and she focused on where the cave split off in front of them.

Mentally pushing the Warp Star even faster, Sunset grit her teeth and turned their stellar vehicle on a dime as soon as they were back in the main cave. She paled at the sight. The lava golem was close now, only a few dozen meters away and approaching rapidly. Magma swirled around it and almost filled the entire cave wall-to-wall, with solid chunks mixed into the mass of semi-liquid rock.

“It’s about to get hot,” Sunset plainly warned, splitting her attention between their cooling charm and what she was about to do.

The temperature effects were immediate. Before, her charm had kept the Warp Star feeling like an annoying summer day. Hot, sure, but nothing totally intolerable. Now, though, she could feel herself sweating, and not just from the exertion. The air around them felt like a damn forge, and she vaguely recalled a time from her youth that she’d snuck down to the castle armory and smithy, both to watch how weapons were constructed and see the fires dance.

Now wasn’t the time for fond recollection of her youth, however; she had a golem to contain. Her corona flared even brighter as she grasped the roof of the left path in her telekinesis, braced herself, and pulled.

In a terrible cacophony, the cave’s ceiling came crashing down in just the right way to prevent a total cave-in. The dust prevented Sunset from properly viewing it, but she couldn’t afford to wait for it to clear to enact the next stage of her plan. Summoning her magical might, she directed another cooling charm at the rocks just as she heard the golem impact her impromptu wall. As soon as magma pushed its way through the cracks, it froze. Within a few moments, the golem’s portion of the cave had been completely sealed off.

She waited a few more moments with bated breath until she heard the golem stop pounding on the wall and the magma’s bubbling ceased. As soon as she was certain it was safe, she relinquished her cooling charm on the caved-in rock and reapplied it to their Warp Star, much to both her and Marx’s relief.

They took a few seconds to recover their breath and get their wits about them as the temperature cooled from unbearable to merely sweltering. As they did, though, Sunset noted that that took far more mana than it should’ve, but she ignored it for the time being. “Right path?” she asked.

“Right path,” Marx affirmed.

“That. Was. AWESOME!” Rainbow Dash loudly declared, much to the chagrin of everypony else in the room’s ears.

Applejack sighed. Dash’s declarations of awesomeness at most of the action taking place was starting to get a bit grating, but she couldn’t much fault the mare’s excitement. She wasn’t nearly as much of a thrill seeker, per se, as Rainbow was, but Applejack knew how good an adrenaline rush could feel.

It didn’t stop her concern, however. She also knew how dangerous rocks could be.

Very personally.

It served as a bit of a wake-up call, Applejack supposed. It wasn’t the first time that Sunset and Marx had been near death on their adventure, nor had it even been the closest they’d been. And Applejack wasn’t naïve enough to think that this would be the last, either. But something about this near-death experience in particular had shaken the group to their cores.

Besides Dash and Discord, at least. Rarity was staring wide-eyed at the screen, Pinkie’s ears were tilted backward a bit, and Fluttershy had hid behind her bangs again.

They really did need to work on that mare’s self-confidence.

Princess Celestia also seemed incredibly anxious for her former student, breathing rather deeply and with a hoof over her chest. Softly, Princess Luna wrapped a wing around her elder sister. “Sunset can make it through this, I am certain of it,” she whispered, though it was loud enough for the rest of the room to hear, too.

Discord rolled his eyes, which had transformed into a pair of seven-sided dice. Applejack wasn’t the best at mathematics, but she at least knew that that shouldn’t be possible. “Oh, puh-lease,” he groused. “Shimmy Sham there will be just fine. Don’t you ponies face great adversity and impossible odds and come out on top all the time?”

Most of the room shot him a glare, and he at least had the decency to look confused. “What, did I say something wrong?”

“Not everypony comes out on top,” Applejack grumbled.

Sunburst audibly sniffled, and Starlight was very visibly confused when he grasped her in a hug and started crying a bit. Celestia looked at the two with a pitying stare, her eyes indicating that there was a secret there that she was privy to. “No, not everypony does,” she whispered sadly.

Applejack glanced back at Fluttershy, who had leveled her own planning stare at Discord. “We, um, might have to talk about when it’s a good idea to have some tact, soon,” she said.

“So, care to explain whatever the fuck that was?” Sunset asked as she piloted their Warp Star down the cave.

Marx looked at her confusedly. “What is there to explain?” he asked. “It was a lava golem. Seems pretty straightforward.”

Sunset raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure if the naming conventions are different here, but golems in Equestria generally have to be made. That seemed pretty natural.”

Marx frowned. “Well, golems can show up naturally here, at least from what I know of magic. If you get a big enough clump of magic it’ll start bending the world around it and can form it into a pseudo-living thing. That’s actually one of the theories of where Kracko comes from!” He paused to think for a moment. “Though, that can’t really be the case, since Kracko’s clearly intelligent.” He blinked. “And I’m not sure why there’d be enough magic in a random lava pool to form a golem out of.”

Sunset’s train of thought suddenly clicked onto another rail. “What if they’re artificial?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“Here me out,” she continued. “If we’re on the right path here, both Kracko and that lava golem were protecting a Fountain, and meant as traps or trials or something for whoever was going towards one.”

“I’m following,” Marx said, prompting her to continue.

“So what if whoever made the Fountains made them, too!” Sunset exclaimed. “And Kracko was given some kind of AI that developed into full sapience over the years!” She cut herself off. “How old are those legends, anyway–you said around two thousand years? And do you know who built the Fountains?”

“No one does,” Marx replied. “And no one knows exactly how old the legends are, either. Recorded history on Popstar only goes back around two thousand years, and we know that the legends are older than that. And whoever built the Fountains left the system a while ago–archeologists are still digging up some of their stuff, but what they can figure out about them doesn’t match any creature in the known universe.”

“Well that’s ominous,” Sunset commented. Before she could consider that further, a glow from something besides their Warp Star caught her eye. Glancing upward, her eyes widened in surprise. Mounted onto the wall of the cave was a torch, burning brightly.

Excitedly, she sped up the Warp Star a bit. Soon, they passed a second torch, then a third. Within a minute, they’d left their cramped little cave behind and entered a massive, brightly-lit cavern. A river of magma flowed through the back of it, illuminating a series of crude shacks made of rock. On one of the walls stood a door–also made of rock–and the other seemed dug out. Multiple tunnels poked out from it, and it had clearly been mined out; snaking across the rock was an empty portion that definitely once held a vein of ore.

The pickaxe embedded into the wall was a dead giveaway, too. Its head was some purplish metal that Sunset couldn’t identify, and whoever had left it there had clearly left in a hurry. It didn’t seem to be too far stuck in the rock, and the pile of other rocks besides it indicated that the user hadn’t cleaned up.

There was no way of telling how long it had been there, though. Normally a geologically active region like this would wipe away any traces left there very quickly, but this universe had already defied her expectations countless times. For all she knew, that pickaxe could’ve been there for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of years.

Marx even seemed rather confused as well. “An abandoned mine?” he asked.

A chuckle from behind them caused Sunset to launch their Warp Star a good half a meter upward in surprise. “Abandoned?” an older, feminine voice asked. Sunset spun their vehicle around to face the newcomer, revealing a Burning Leo. “Well, I don’t use it as a mine, but I do live here!” She said with a laugh.

Both Sunset and Marx were at a bit of a loss for words. “Uh…hi?” Sunset tried.

“Hi to you too,” the Burning Leo replied, clearly amused. “I don’t get many visitors down here. What’s brought a couple of young Dreamlanders up to Hotbeat? And into my volcano, at that?”

“We’re looking for Hotbeat’s Fountain of Dreams,” Marx explained. “Do you know where it is?”

The Burning Leo gave a hearty laugh and pointed at the door. “Why, it’s right through there and down the hallway.”

Sunset grinned. “Thanks, we’ll be right on our way and-”

The Burning Leo held up a hand. “Now I’ll stop you right there, Missy. Y’see, I’ve got the key to the Fountain room.” To emphasize her point, she held up the key in question. “And I don’t want anyone to just waltz in and leave the door open.”

“So what, you want us to prove ourselves or something?” Sunset asked, rolling her eyes. “Need us to dive into the lava river?”

The Burning Leo chuckled again. “Hah, no, nothing that’d be certain death,” she responded. “I do kind of live in the wall between here and the Fountain, though.” Her expression darkened a bit. “And there’s a Chameleo Arm that’s decided to make himself my roommate without my permission. Think you could get him out?”

Sunset frowned in concentration. Chameleo Arms, from what she recalled of their Bandee-translated library binge session, were essentially just giant chameleons with absurdly stretchy arms. This shouldn't be too bad. “Sure,” she said with a shrug. “We can do that.”

The Burning Leo smiled. “Thank you. Follow me.” Turning, she started making her way towards the door. “Oh, and you can call me Bridget, by the way.”

Sunset nodded, though her thought process was elsewhere at this point as they lazily followed behind Bridget on their Warp Star. “Say, if the Fountain is this close, why can’t I feel its magic?”

Bridget looked back, her eyes wide. “You can feel Fountain magic?”

“...Yeah?” Sunset replied. “Is that strange? I’d think anyone powerful enough would be able to feel it.”

“Power’s got nothing to do with it,” Bridget explained. “There’re just a scant few creatures that’re really able to feel the Fountains.” She shook her head to clear it. “But anyway, to answer your question, it’s probably the mithril in the walls blocking it.”

Marx choked, and Sunset raised an eyebrow. “Mithril is a real thing, here?”

“Well, it’s what that pick over there is made of, and I’m pretty sure it’s what they were mining here,” Bridget offered.

“I thought mithril was a myth,” Marx added. “There’s been speculation that it’s what the Fountains and Star Rods are made of, but no one’s been able to replicate it to know for sure.”

“So what exactly is mithril, then?” Sunset asked. “I assume it’s magical?”

“Intensely so,” Bridget confirmed. By this point, they’d reached the door and she’d inserted the key. “Mithril is packed full of magic, so much that it actively deflects magical fields with its own.”

“Is that how Nightmare was contained, then?” Sunset pondered aloud. “The Fountain being mithril blocked his magic?”

Carefully, Sunset maneuvered the Warp Star through the now-open door as Marx thought about that. She frowned as she felt the magic around them twist and turn–it seemed Bridget was right about mithril interfering with magical fields.

“Probably,” Marx eventually answered. “But mithril is supposed to be insanely difficult to deform. I have to wonder how they even made the Fountains out of it–or that pickaxe, for that matter.”

“Maybe an alloy?” Sunset wondered. “Combining it with something like gold could help with the malleability.”

“Maybe,” Marx conceded.

“This is all fascinating,” Bridget cut in, “but we’re here and you’ve got a chameleon to deal with.”

Sunset looked around. The room they were in was noticeably cooler, but still hot enough that the Warp Star shattering would render her useless in a fight. It was also designed like a temple of some sort, glyphs decorating the walls. It was well-lit, at least; torches covered much of the wall space, brightening the area up enough to see. On the far side was a second door, clearly the way to the Fountain.

Sunset glanced around, looking for the Chameleo Arm. They could render themselves nearly invisible, so she’d need to be constantly vigila-

She quickly spun their Warp Star out of the way as an invisible arm rushed past them, slamming into the ground hard enough to crack it. She had just barely seen it from the light refracting through, but that hard of a hit would’ve completely shattered their ride if it connected.

With a shimmer, the Chameleo Arm made itself visible. It was currently an orangish color and sticking to the ceiling, clearly content to take potshots using its arm. Its eyes looked in two different directions, one focusing on Sunset and Marx, while the other looked at Bridget. He retracted his arm, shimmered back into invisibility, and dodged Sunset’s retaliatory strike of magic.

She silently cursed at that. One good hit would probably take it out, sure, but the same was true for them. If the Warp Star shattered, they were done for.

Fortunately, the Chameleo Arm was having just as much trouble hitting them as they were hitting it. It had invisibly struck back twice now, and both times Sunset had dodged. The first she saw again because of the light refraction, but the second just barely missed because of Marx calling it out.

Sunset frowned. This stalemate really did not work for any of them. But with so much space for the Chameleo Arm to run around on, she didn’t see it ending anytime soon unless they could manage to flush it out.

Well, she considered, that could work.

“Bridget, would you mind providing some extra fire?” Sunset asked, moving their Warp Star a bit to the left to dodge a third strike.

Bridget shrugged. “Sure,” she answered simply, spewing out a flame that Sunset grabbed ahold of in her magic.

Using both a pyrokinetic and cryokinetic spell simultaneously would feel oxymoronic to most novice spellcasters. After all, controlling ice and fire at the same time seems impossible! Of course, a slightly more educated view reveals the truth: pyrokinesis and cryokinesis are really just extensions of the more general thermokinesis, the art of taking energy and moving it somewhere else. Cryokinesis was more crude, selecting an area and just diverting energy away from it. That, though, meant that it took less energy to maintain a spell over long periods of time. Pyrokinesis, on the other hoof, required more energy to do consistently, but was far flashier and able to get results quite a bit faster. Sunset was personally better at the latter, but she could do both just fine.

So, using both simultaneously was only as difficult as using any two spells at once. For Sunset, that made it nearly as easy as breathing. She did have to divert her attention three different ways, sure, but controlling the Warp Star and keeping them cool could both be done nearly subconsciously. Most of her focus was on the fire she was controlling, both from Bridget and the room’s many torches.

“Close your eyes!” Sunset shouted in warning.

She gathered up the energy near the center of the room before it exploded outward. It was an incredibly bright flash, and if it wasn’t for her warning it would’ve temporarily blinded them. Chameleons, though–and Chameleo Arms too–had no eyelids, and one eye had clearly been wide open in the direction of the flash.

The Chameleo Arm hissed in pain as he suddenly saw stars in that eye, but Sunset wasn’t quite done yet. Directing the energy into the walls and ceiling, the structure heated up dramatically. This Chameleo Arm in particular had clearly adapted to the heat, but even those adaptations weren’t enough to protect him from the rock suddenly reaching hundreds of degrees.

He let out some sort of cry as he fell to the ground, involuntarily relinquishing his grip on the ceiling. He looked around with his good eye before settling on the door and making a mad dash for it, seemingly content to get out of Bridget’s hair.

Bridget gave a belly laugh as Sunset refocused on making sure their cooling charm was up to snuff. “Oh, I didn’t think I’d ever be rid of him! This is perfect!”

Sunset and Marx both chuckled a bit. “So, the Fountain?” Marx prodded.

“Oh, of course!” Bridget exclaimed. Grabbing a second key, she rushed for the far door and unlocked it.

As soon as it was open, Sunset could feel the Fountain empowering her. The fights and constantly trying to keep cool had been taking a bit of a toll on her magic, but she breathed in deeply as she felt it replenishing just from proximity to the Fountain. Clearly, she’d need to keep an eye out for more of this mithril stuff if it had such a major effect on magic.

“Have a great day!” Sunset called as they passed Bridget.

She just responded with a jaunty wave.

As they entered the Fountain’s chamber, Sunset made a beeline for it. The Warp Star they got from Skyhigh finally shattered, absorbing itself into her horn just as she and Marx plunged into the Fountain’s waters. It was nice and cool, and before they continued, Sunset just took a moment to relax herself and soak in the magic.

Hotbeat’s Fountain felt absolutely ancient in its magic. It felt deep and powerful–not unlike Celestia’s, actually.

Sunset surfaced and leapt up to touch the Star Rod before long, though. They’d already spent upwards of six hours on this and still had three planets to go before they could summon Nova.

The power coalesced into a new Warp Star, this one another unique color. Hotbeat’s was a deep red, similar to the color of cooling lava. She smiled as she and Marx hopped on. There were a couple close calls, but she did feel that this was her favorite planet so far.

“So, how are we gonna get out?” Marx asked. “Do we just carefully go back up the cave?”

Sunset grinned and shook her head. The Fountain was right there, and it felt like absorbing Skyhigh’s Warp Star had given her another power boost. Without answering verbally, she lit her horn and they vanished in a flash of light.

They reappeared, still floating on their Warp Star, kilometers above the surface again.

Marx looked at her incredulously. “And you couldn’t use that to get us to the Fountain because…”

“I didn’t know where it was,” Sunset explained. “If I tried to teleport us to it, I’d probably get us stuck inside the rock and we’d suffocate. Here, at least, I knew I could just teleport straight up around thirty kilometers without wasting any energy because of the Fountain.”

Marx seemed satisfied with that. “Fair enough.”

Before they left Hotbeat behind for good, though, Sunset glanced back down at the volcano. There used to be a whole civilization here. A civilization advanced enough to mine mithril and shape it into the Fountains, to build artificial, intelligent life, and to change the course of history for an entire star system. Clearly they had intended to stick around.

So there was just one, very nagging question. Where did they all go?

Sunset’s gaze focused on the volcano’s crater. She hadn’t noticed it before, but the shape of the crater was rather odd. It didn’t look so much like it had exploded, but had rather been sliced; the lava was spilling out of a similarly-shaped gash to what she had seen on Aquarius.

Her mind flashed back to an image of bloody water surrounding a headless body. Or, she gulped, what killed them?

Author's Note

Summoning Stars: 5/8

I think mithril is the first thing I've added that isn't strictly a thing in Kirby lore, but the setting is absolutely right for a magical metal like that. Don't worry; it won't be superseding anything in the canon, just be tangentially linked to it.

Also, remember how I said I was posting this at 5PM EDT? Well, I figured that waiting that long was a bit unnecessary, so here, take this chapter a full 15 hours early! And on that note as well, the Cavius chapter will be posted at the latest next Saturday. Both it and the Mekkai chapters are done, and Halfmoon is well underway. Next week is Finals Week, so I'll have quite a bit of free time when I'm not studying! If I finish writing the MWW arc by next Saturday, I'll be speeding up the chapter releases to once every three days until the backlog is all posted!

So be sure to stay tuned for chapter twenty: Cavius, the Calamitous Cavern.

Chapter XX: Cavius, the Calamitous Cavern

“Alright Sunburst, I think that’s enough wine for you.”

Sunburst, still with a tear-stained face, whimpered a little bit as Starlight grabbed ahold of his wineglass and levitated it away from him. “B-but, they just teleported thirty kilometers straight up!” he made a token effort to complain.

“Which is far from the most impossible feat they’ve pulled off in the last few hours,” Starlight retorted. “I think you stopped drinking because of that a while ago.”

Sunburst sniffled again. “N-no, you’re right,” he admitted. “My dad died a few years ago, and now there’s a chance we could get Sunset back and I can’t–I don’t want–I just…”

“Don’t wanna consider that ya might lose her, too?” Applejack finished, cutting in.

Sunburst just nodded as an answer.

Pinkie, in mere moments, had launched herself across the room to wrap him up in a hug. Celestia joined as well, comfortingly wrapping a wing around Sunburst. Starlight sat to the side, looking a bit uncomfortable at the prospect of the group hug going on beside her, but was yoinked into it by a pink hoof soon enough.

Rarity was dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, Fluttershy had a distinctive sadness about her, and Rainbow was trying her best to feign disinterest and focus on the screen.

Applejack raised an eyebrow at the lack of response from Discord. “What, no snarky response from ya?”

Discord huffed. “As much as I detest the idea of…tact,” he spat, as if the very word was poison to him, “I do know how much it would be considered so dreadfully rude to interrupt something like this.”

That got him a soft smile from Fluttershy.

“If I may, Discord,” Luna said, snapping attention to her from those outside of the embracing mass of equines. “What time is it in Equestria, currently? Surely if it is close to morning, Tia and I will have to leave soon to perform our duties.”

Discord rolled his eyes again and snapped his paw. “There, your precious celestial cycle will be preserved for a few more hours.”

“Oh?” Luna questioned.

“What, you don’t believe me?” Discord gasped, a paw over his chest. “Oh the betrayal, to be thought a liar by one so dear to the highest authority in the land. Surely, you believe this can end in no way but my second imprisonment.”

“No, I do believe your assertion, Discord,” Luna refuted. “I just find it surprising that one such as you would do something so…orderly.”

Discord scoffed. “Please, watching your reactions to this is far more entertaining!” He once more reached into his popcorn bag, retrieving an entire raw potato that he tossed into his mouth. “Besides, how am I supposed to watch Celly nearly get a heart attack every five minutes if she isn’t here to watch!”

That got him a glare from the Princess of the Sun, but he laughed it off all the same.

“So, what’s the next stop?” Sunset asked as they rushed towards the next point of light.

“If I remember the order of the planets right, we should be coming up on Cavius next,” Marx answered. “Its surface doesn’t have a lot going on, but it’s absolutely covered in caves.”

“Caves like the one on Hotbeat, or actual caves?” Sunset inquired.

“Actual caves,” Marx clarified. “We should be able to leave the Warp Star safely here.”

Sunset nodded as they approached the planet. Just like the others, it was far smaller than actual planets–dwarf planet sized, at most. Cavius seemed to lack vegetation on its surface, covered in a gray, rocky crust. Pockmarked across the entire thing was a large number of openings, presumably to the cavernous interior, but that wasn’t what drew Sunset’s eye.

No, what she was focusing on was the massive point of light on the surface. “What’s that?” she asked.

“Pretty much everything on Cavius lives in one city,” Marx explained. “If we aim for that, we can figure out where the Fountain is by asking around, probably.”

Sunset maneuvered the Warp Star to aim for that as their landing point. As they entered the atmosphere, she spoke up. “So how much do you know about Cavius’s culture?”

“Pretty much nothing at all,” Marx admitted. “I’ve never been and I don’t know anyone who has.”

“So we’re going in blind, got it,” Sunset said. “Here’s to hoping the locals are friendly.”

They were close enough now to see the city proper. It was massive, sprawling out from the foot of a mountain all the way to the horizon. The vast majority of buildings appeared to be houses, but near the mountain itself they generally got taller. Not quite skyscraper-sized, but taller than most buildings in Canterlot barring the palace.

Speaking of palaces, built into the mountain was a giant one, rivaling even Canterlot Palace’s size. Unlike Canterlot Palace though, which was constructed as an actual government building, this seemed to be one, giant room. The windows into it were utterly massive, allowing Sunset to see an equally massive behemoth inside on an absurdly large throne.

She promptly decided that she did not want to fuck with that.

Moving on, she looked around the rest of the base of the mountain. Near the palace was what looked like their best spot to land: a large building with bright, flashing lights pointing up to the sky and a sizable crowd in front of it. They spiraled around a couple times to scout out exactly where to land before Sunset plunged the Warp Star down, decelerating just enough to comfortably step off before it shattered.

She grinned as the fragments absorbed themselves into her horn. “Yep, I’m definitely getting better at that.”

“It’s better than getting thrown onto the floor, at least,” Marx agreed.

Sunset began making for the building. Now that they had a closer look at it, she could see that it was built into the mountain itself, the circular exterior of it protruding from the slope. “All we gotta do is find someone to ask about where the Fountain is and be on our way!”

A very loud snicker off to the side interrupted them before Marx could reply. “You hear that, bro?” a yellow Bonkers asked, loud enough to cause a scene and draw the crowd’s attention. “A couple o’ newbies are tryin’ for the Fountain!”

A second Bonkers, this one purple, joined in on the laughter. “Look at ‘em! Betcha they don’t even make it down three floors!”

Sunset raised an unamused eyebrow, while Marx grinned his fishing-for-information grin. “Floors?”

The yellow Bonkers wiped a tear from his eye as he continued to laugh. “Listen! They don’t even know the floor system!”

“Y’see, here on Cavius, we enjoy this little thing called trial by combat,” the purple Bonkers explained.

“Bloodsport, if you will,” the yellow one added.

“An’ if ya wanna see the Fountain, ya’ve gotta get through ten floors o’ it!” purple elaborated. “But you scrawny little things won’t even last two, I bet!”

Sunset rolled her eyes. As much as Celestia had detested her picking fights with guards, there was a reason the guard captain had liked her. The one from before that Shining whatever pony got the job, at least. That reason was rather simple: she was able to knock the more arrogant recruits down a peg with relative ease.

This, it seemed, was no different. Her horn glowing, she wrenched purple’s hammer from his grip and slammed it into the ground. The stone tile it impacted was pretty much completely pulverized, and the vibration sent most of the close-by crowd stumbling. “Where do we sign up?”

The Bonkers looked at each other and grinned.

“So, you two are looking to try your hand-” the Waddle Dee running signups blinked, “er, hoof in the Arena?”

“Yepperoni!” Marx declared. “So is there anything special we’ve gotta do to sign up, or…”

The Waddle Dee looked over his glasses and adjusted his bowtie. “Well, for one thing, we don’t allow competitors to sign up as a team except for during special events.”

Marx pouted. “Figures. Eh, I wouldn’t’ve been much help in actual fights anyhow.”

“Don’t put yourself down that much!” Sunset griped. “You’re…good at insulting things to distract them?”

“Case in point,” Marx stage whispered to the Waddle Dee, “that.”

The Dee chuckled. “You can still watch, at least.”

“I assume that the matches are in an actual colosseum so people can watch, then?” Sunset asked.

“Sort of,” the Waddle Dee answered vaguely. “But on top of that this’ll be televised!”

Sunset blinked. “Huh?”

“Mhm!” the Dee confirmed. “We don’t often get challengers from off-world, so…” he slid a piece of paper and a pen across the counter, “can you just sign this real quick? It’s just an agreement for us to broadcast your fights. And also that we are not liable for any injuries you might sustain in combat.”

Sunset levitated the document up to her and began speed-reading. Everything did seem to be in order, at least as much as bloodsport could be, so she shrugged and signed. “If it gets us closer to the Fountain, might as well.”

“Great!” the Dee excitedly took the paper back. “Now, technically, I’m supposed to test your mettle to make sure you won’t just get stomped on Floor On-”

Sunset cut him off by telekinetically grabbing his feet and flipping him upside down. “Is that sufficient?”

“Yes,” he deadpanned as his glasses fell off. “I was going to say that that little altercation on the street proved that I don’t need to test you. Can you put me down and give me my glasses back, please?”

Sunset blinked, and quickly did as he asked. “Sorry.”

She was still entirely unsure of how she knew a Waddle Dee was grinning, even with no visible mouth. “Don’t be! We need that kind of energy during the fights, so keep it up!”

He looked at Marx and pointed to a side entrance. “Spectator stands are through that way, and since you’re not a Cavius native and came here with a challenger, we won’t charge you.”

Marx grinned and ran off to claim a seat.

Turning back to Sunset, the Waddle Dee pulled out a bag and placed it on the counter. “Here are the healing items that you are allowed. Use of them during a fight is strictly banned and will result in a disqualification, but you’re free to eat as much as you want between fights.”

Sunset peeked inside. Three maxim tomatoes and three tangerines. “The Bonkers from earlier said that there were ten floors?”

“There are, yes,” the Waddle Dee confirmed.

Sunset nodded firmly, beginning a plan. She’d need to ration her heals sparingly, but she was confident that she could make it through this. “Any other restrictions?”

“You’re not allowed to do anything lethal, and none of your opponents will be aiming to kill, either,” the Waddle Dee added. “Other than that, anything goes.”

“Wasn’t planning on it,” Sunset assured. Pursing her lips, she looked right at him. “I’m ready.”

The Dee pointed to the opulent doors at the front of the Arena. “The main entrance is for challengers. Feel free to wait inside there; we’ll call you out into the ring when the first fight is ready to begin. You’re on in fifteen minutes!”

“I…am uncertain how I feel about this,” Celestia admitted, much to everypony’s shock.

Discord, of course, displayed that shock in the most Discord way possible. “My my, is old Celly warming up to the idea of violence?” Without leaving his seat, he stretched his torso, bent around the still-sullen Sunburst and Starlight, and got right up in Celestia’s face. Plucking a hair off her mane, he peered at the flowing magical strand with a magnifying glass. “Well it certainly seems to be you. Are you sure that you haven’t been replaced by a changeling, though?”

Celestia chuckled. “I am sure that I would know if I was replaced by a changeling, Discord.”

“Well, this is just a complete tonal shift, then!” he celebrated. “How soon before I can make my chaos games a reality?”

Celestia gave him a Look. “Never.”

Discord pouted.

“I take it you have an additional explanation, dear sister?” Luna prodded.

Celestia sighed. “I do not condone violent solutions to problems,” she clarified, “but my disapproval of Sunset learning combat magic was part of what led to our falling out. Clearly she is a…fan of this kind of bloodsport. If she must get involved in something like this, I would much prefer for it to be in a controlled environment.”

Discord huffed. “Fine, use the logical argument. You ponies really are no fun sometimes.”

Sunset paced around in the waiting room, her eyes constantly flicking to the clock. She knew that she could do this, no matter what this Arena threw at her. She had been Celestia’s personal protégé, damnit! She shouldn’t be this nervous!

But she was.

Sunset stopped pacing and forced herself to focus on her breathing. She could hear the crowd gathered in the stands outside, the quiet murmur of anticipation permeating the entire space. Any moment now, and it would begi-

“Wwwwwwwelcome back folks, to live coverage of Cavius’s very own Arena!” The speakers went on all at once, amplifying the voice of the Waddle Dee from out front as the audience’s cheers bled through the wall. “We’ve got a very special program for you today, because here comes a challenger from off-world!”

Well, there was her queue. Sunset began making for the door.

“Standing at one hundred and three centimeters from hoof to horn and weighing in at ninety-four kilograms, this unicorn will pack far more of a punch than a glance at her would say!” the announcer excitedly declared. “Coming all the way from Planet Popstar, please welcome Sunset Shimmer!”

Sunset casually strode through the door and into the Arena proper, the crowd cheering wildly as sports fans are wont to do. She stared at them, barely able to spot Marx’s jester hat in the third row amongst the sea of spectators. The Arena was packed, and it seemed that this was the main entertainment that Cavius usually got. She grinned the best grin she could and waved to the crowd.

As she did, she glanced around. It seemed that, at the very least, her first match would be a no-holds-barred spar. The ground was a completely even dirt floor, and the ring entirely circular. The Arena wasn’t open to the air–there was a rock ceiling brightly lit by scores of lights–but the ceiling was so high up it might as well have been. The far side of the ring contained a door, where Sunset assumed that her opponents would be coming in from.

“And for her first opponent,” the announcer began shouting again, “you all know him as the Beetle King, let’s give a Cavius welcome to Boris the Bugzzy!”

The crowd outright exploded in cheers, and Sunset got the feeling that she was very much not going to be the favorite to win in any of these matches. No matter, she was going to win them anyway.

Her adversary strutted forward, apparently confident in his victory. The Bugzzy chittered in excitement, shifting his right foot backward and preparing to run.

“BEGIN!” the announcer shouted.

Immediately, Boris exploded into action, rushing forward in an attempt to grab her between his mandibles. For a moment, Sunset pondered if she should just set him on fire and be done with it, but it was just the first round.

She felt a grin cross her face. So, they wanted a show? She could give them a show.

Even as Boris was rushing forward, Sunset simply strode towards her opponent lazily. Once he was within a few meters of her, she lit her horn, and the crowd gasped as she caught him in her telekinetic grasp. In a swift motion, she sent him flying, and he impacted the wall with a resounding crash.

Sunset tutted in disappointment when the dust cleared and revealed an unconscious Bugzzy and a delighted crowd. She had thought that it would at least provide some amount of challenge, but she bet that she could get more out of sparring with the one in Castle Dedede. Hell, she hadn’t even used any pyroturgy.

As Boris was carted out of the Arena by staff, the announcer spoke up. “Oof, and it looks like our challenger has secured a quick victory over Boris! Let’s hope that future matches have a bit more going on! Does she wish to use any of her healing items?”

“No, I’m good!” Sunset called.

She stumbled a bit when the ground began moving. Quickly, though, she realized that the floor itself was descending into the ground; it seemed as if each “floor” was physically lower down than the last, but whoever had designed this arena had made it their mission to keep the fights visible to the audience at all times.

After a few moments, the floor had descended to the correct height, revealing another door directly below the last. “Next up, we have the master of all things explosive, Castle Cavius’s very own bomb tech, Aiden the Poppy Bros Senior!”

The door flew open, and the Poppy Bros hopped out to face Sunset. “I wonder, Miss Shimmer, if you will burn as bright as your name suggests.”

Sunset grinned and lit her horn with a blank spell, ready to cast whatever was necessary. “Oh, I’m sure this match will be quite explosive. I won’t be the one burning, though.”

“We shall see about that,” Aiden taunted back.

“BEGIN!”

Instantly, Aiden threw three bombs her way, which were met midair by three streams of fire from her horn. They all detonated in the air, much to the oohs and aahs of the crowd.

Aiden bounced a bit to his left. “I see that you, too, are a user of the art of fire.”

“What can I say?” Sunset smiled. “I like it hot.”

They spent a few moments moving in a bit of a circle, Aiden taking the initiative to lob a bomb every so often while Sunset was content to play defensively. Neither was performing at their best, and both were fully aware that they were simply testing the other’s strengths.

“‘Twould seem that we are at a stalemate,” Aiden commented.

“Mayhaps,” Sunset replied.

Aiden grinned. “Oh, but this next bomb may be a bit of a…shocker.”

The bomb he threw, instead of having the usual wick, was sparking with electricity. Sunset’s eyes widened–she was quite a bit surprised that a Poppy Bros had access to elemental bombs.

Acting quickly, she grasped the dirt floor in her magic and wrenched it upward into a pillar, intercepting the bomb and grounding the electrical discharge. Aiden seemed a bit put out that his trick was dispatched so easily, and Sunset smirked at him. It looked like he didn’t have anything else in his bag of tricks based on his expression, so she finally decided to go on the offensive.

Sprinting around her pillar, she charged at Aiden. Panicked, he lobbed three more bombs at her, but she was ready. She couldn’t just detonate them before they reached her–she was close enough now that she’d be caught in the explosion. But she still had time to throw up a shield before they could get too close, and the closest one hit her shield instead of her, harmlessly detonating against it.

The other two she was able to grab in her telekinesis and lob back at Aiden, and the dual explosions sent him hurtling backwards. She followed it up with a flamethrower spell, right as he was getting back up to throw another bomb, detonating it in his hands.

That proved to be too much, and the consequent slam into the wall knocked him out as the crowd cheered.

“And with that explosive victory, Sunset Shimmer moves on to Floor Three! From here on, we will no longer ask if you would like to use a healing item between floors. You just have to eat it during the floor transition!”

“Got it!” Sunset shouted.

With the affirmation that she’d heard, the floor once again descended, revealing a third door. “Up next, here comes the champion of the Cavern 500, the Grand Wheelie who they call the Drift King!”

With a sound not unlike a motorcycle rev, a Grand Wheelie burst through the door and drifted to a stop as the crowd cheered louder than they ever had so far. He seemed to soak up the attention, bouncing a bit in his tire.

“BEGIN!”

The fight, if Sunset was being honest, was just more of the same. Wait for the Grand Wheelie to charge at her, grab him in her telekinesis, and slam it into the wall. He was a bit hardier than the Bugzzy, sure, but he really just did not change up his strategy at all. She didn’t even have to move.

Hell, she even decided to really show off by transmuting some of the dirt in front of it into soap to finish it off by sending it crashing into the wall under its own power. She found it hilarious, and if the crowd’s laughter was anything to go by, they did too.

The next two floors were also disappointingly easy. She’d gotten a bit careless fighting the King Doo on Floor Four and had to use one of her tangerines, but the Mister Frosty they had her fighting against on Floor Five was just a horrible matchup for him, really. She wasn’t quite sure if it was just the power boosts from the Warp Stars helping out, but the Frosty employed by the Meta-Knights had been a harder fight than this.

As the unconscious Mister Frosty was removed from the Arena, even the crowd had begun to get a bit bored at how easy it had been for her. “Well, our challenger has been storming through everything we can throw at her, but next up is a fighter that’s sure to put on a good show!” the announcer declared as the floor descended. “She’s mean, she’s green, and she’s got one hell of a sword, it’s Jillian the Gigant Edge!”

The being that emerged from the door on Floor Six truly lived up to the name of Gigant Edge. She was almost two meters tall and covered head to toe in heavy, green armor. She wielded a sword nearly as large as she was, and on her other arm held a spiked shield.

She did not speak, instead simply lumbering forward. Both fighters eyed each other warily, awaiting the call they both knew would come soon.

“BEGIN!”

Sunset acted immediately, bounding forward to send in a light magical attack to probe Jillian’s defenses. As expected, the small beam bounced right off of her armor, and she responded by rushing forward in kind, far faster than Sunset had been expecting.

Her eyes widened and she jumped backwards just in time to avoid the blade, which slammed into the ground and kicked up a massive cloud of dust. Sunset turned that right around on her, using the only atmoturgical spell she could perform reliably: wind.

Early spellcasters had been quite uncreative when naming their spells.

Regardless, the dust was pushed directly in front of Jillian’s helmet, and she stumbled back, coughing. Sunset pressed the advantage, running in and sending a stream of fire Jillian’s way. The swordswoman, unfortunately, was nimble enough to dodge it and raise her shield to block Sunset’s followup attack: ripping out part of the floor and launching it at her.

Sunset frowned. She needed to get rid of that shield to have any chance at getting at Jillian herself, but the thing was attached to her arm. The only way to really get rid of it would be to melt it, but sending fire right at her was out. She could just dodge it.

As the Gigant Edge shifted, though, Sunset’s eyes caught sight of something she just might be able to use: Jillian’s sword. Yes, her grip on her sword wasn’t quite as tight as the one on her shield, so if Sunset could get it away from her…

Her plan formed, Sunset rushed her again. It wasn’t the best plan, and she wasn’t entirely a fan of using herself as bait, but she needed some way to bait out an attack.

Jillian, of course, responded to her sprint by setting up her shield, but Sunset had expected that. A token magical beam bounced off of it again, and just as Sunset suspected, the swordswoman responded with an attack of her own. Jillian ran at her, sword at the ready, and once again missed as Sunset proved herself to be the more agile of the two.

Or at least, so she thought. Before she could get a good telekinetic grip on Jillian’s sword, the Gigant Edge whirled around far faster than Sunset thought something of her stature could. She didn’t even have time to get a shield of her own up before Jillian slammed hers into her, so the unicorn had to settle for raising her foreleg and hoping that that at least protected her vitals.

Shit, she mentally cursed as she was flung through the air, roughly landing a few meters away and involuntarily crying out in pain. The spiked shield hadn’t hit anything vital, it felt like, but she had felt it slice her left leg. Sparing a glance down, she immediately felt a bit woozy.

She was bleeding.

Profusely.

Jillian lumbered forward, and Sunset still dragged herself to her hooves despite the pain. She needed to end this quickly, given that she wasn’t very much a fan of the idea of bleeding out. She’d gotten cocky, and she recognized the trick for what it was: the first five floors were just a warmup, and it was very much uphill from here.

The crowd went silent in anticipation as Jillian lumbered forward. Assured as she was in her victory, she seemingly felt no need to speed this up. Sunset was at her mercy and everyone knew it.

But Sunset wasn’t the only one who could fall prey to arrogance.

Jillian overextended on her strike, thinking that Sunset, weakened as she was, was an easy target. She quickly proved that notion false as she stopped Jillian’s blade short, the telltale sign of telekinesis–her aquamarine magic–coating it. She could almost feel the tension in the crowd rise with the sudden development.

The two combatants stood there for a moment, Jillian unsure of what to do and Sunset straining to ignore the pain in her leg. That moment didn’t last, though, and Sunset quickly wrenched the sword from Jillian’s grip, turning the Gigant Edge’s own edge against her.

Jillian raised her shield, intending to end the battle with a shield bash instead, but Sunset had other plans. Channeling her knowledge of pyroturgy, the sword caught ablaze and glowed red hot.

Sunset could see Jillian’s eyes widen behind her helmet, and her grin almost turned feral. She pressed the flaming weapon right up to the shield, which even began to melt from the heat. It was still too slow, and Sunset could feel herself tapping into her cutie mark magic directly as she turned up the heat even more. The sword, at this point, was melting too, but that didn’t matter too much once Sunset was through with the shield and beginning to direct the molten metal towards Jillian’s armor.

Finally, the Gigant Edge spoke the first proper words of the match.

“I yield!”

And that was enough for the fight to officially be considered over. The crowd went wild, but Sunset had other things to worry about. As soon as Jillian left the field, she opened up the healing bag and popped a tangerine in her mouth. The wound closed and she stopped bleeding, but she winced as the dizziness remained. Sighing, she ate the last of her tangerines to replenish the blood she had lost, and was down to three maxim tomatoes.

It could’ve been worse, she supposed. She was lucky enough that she had just sustained a flesh wound; if something was actually broken she would have needed to use one of the maxim tomatoes. As it was, she still had enough food to last for the next three breaks, and if things continued like this, she’d need it. Sighing, she glanced down at her foreleg as the ground began to descend for the sixth time. Her usually orange fur was stained red with her own blood, and there was a pool of it a few paces behind her.

She shook her head to clear it. She could wash it off later, but right now she had to focus on the battles.

“What a stunning performance we had there, folks!” the announcer cheerfully stated, as if Sunset hadn’t just nearly bled out. “But is our challenger truly a one-trick pony? She’s burned through the competition so far, but now it’s time to see if she can fight fire with fire!”

The seventh door flung open, and a Fire Lion strutted out of it. His mane ablaze, he let out a roar and charged, not even waiting for the announcer.

Of course, he still shouted, even as Sunset was actively dodging the lion’s strike. “BEGIN!”

This fight went even more poorly. The Fire Lion was fast, so much so that Sunset almost couldn’t track it. Whenever she thought she could get a good shot on it with some cryokinetic spell or another, it deftly leapt out of the way. Once, when it landed behind her, it had managed to score a hit with its fire breath, singing away much of the fur on her right foreleg and resulting in what Sunset estimated were first or second degree burns.

She managed to trap it in a block of ice after a few minutes of back-and-forth like that, but much like Kirby, it busted out in an explosion. Unlike when she had fought Kirby, though, this explosion also included a large amount of force behind it from the expanding steam, which launched Sunset against the wall and snapped her left hind leg.

Unable to really stand, she did manage to trap the Fire Lion a second time, and this time it stuck. All the cryoturgy she had been doing had cooled down the area significantly, preventing the lion from properly using its fire. After thirty incredibly tense seconds of it being trapped and immobile in the ice, the Fire Lion was disqualified and she was given leave to eat her first maxim tomato to deal with the broken bones and burned skin.

Floor Eight was somehow even worse. She would’ve expected the elephant-like Phan Phan to be an easier target–elephants were famously big targets and relatively slow compared to something like a pony. Even with this one being so different to a usual elephant, she was confident that she could take it down.

She knew she was in for a challenge, though, as soon as it started rolling at her.

The fight went similarly to Floor Seven’s, though Sunset was using her preferred pyroturgy. Unfortunately, the Phan Phan was able to just roll through much of her fire, rendering many of her attacks nearly useless.

The operative term there is “nearly.”

As long as Sunset kept herself paying attention, she could dodge the Phan Phan’s attacks and chip away at it. Her fire was still doing some damage as the bipedal elephant rolled through it, so she resolved herself to just keep this up. As much as she wanted to just pick up the Phan Phan and hurl it into the wall, much like she had done to the Bugzzy and Grand Wheelie, it was legitimately too heavy to easily redirect its momentum.

Plus, as loath as she was to admit it, she was starting to get tired. Not so much magically–she was still good to keep casting–but it seemed that the healing food worked far better on repairing physical damage, rather than curing exhaustion. The longer this went on, the more tired she’d get.

Unfortunately, the fight continued for several minutes, and Sunset was far from infallible. After a solid eight and a half minutes of the Phan Phan rolling at her and her just barely jumping out of the way, it got close enough to actually score a hit.

Just as Sunset had been about to jump out of the way, the (now rather injured) Phan Phan had skidded to a stop and lashed out with its trunk, wrapping it around her previously-burned foreleg. Before she could properly react, the Phan Phan squeezed.

Sunset felt multiple things break in her leg, but by this point she’d broken so many bones in the last couple weeks that she was a bit desensitized to the pain. She was able to just completely power through it, and the Phan Phan had made a critical error in coming to a stop and attaching itself to her: she now had a completely still target.

Raising up her other forehoof, Sunset punched the Phan Phan right in the eye, forcing it to involuntarily relinquish its hold on her leg. Focusing her magic while making sure to not put too much pressure on her injured limb, Sunset held the bipedal elephant still long enough for her to rip another chunk from the ground, compress it, and hit the Phan Phan hard enough with it to knock it out.

Once the unconscious Phan Phan had been removed from the Arena, Sunset ate her second maxim tomato, relishing in the feeling of her bones once again being unbroken. Two floors left.

The ninth door now in view, the announcer began his spiel once again. “Only one challenge remains before our challenger faces off against her final opponent! But this will surely be her toughest foe yet!”

Something banged on the door.

“They’re big!”

A second banging sound.

“They’re strong!”

With a third strike, the doors flew open to reveal her opponent…s.

“Give it up for the Bonkers Brothers!”

The crowd’s cheering increased dramatically as the two Bonkers that Sunset had run into earlier strutted out onto the field. She couldn’t actually see said crowd at this point–the floor was far too far down for her to look into the stands–but it was still almost enough for her to wince from the volume.

“Well would ya look at that,” the yellow Bonkers said, “the lil’ pony’s got some fight to her after all!”

The purple one twirled his hammer in his hand and took a fighting stance. “You ain’t gonna get your little hoofsies on my hammer that easily this time!”

Sunset smiled and lit her horn. “Please, gentlemen,” she taunted, “do you think I’ll even need to take your weapons?”

“Ooh, sounds like this match is gonna be spicy!” the announcer noted. “BEGIN!”

As usual, they all exploded into action. With two targets, Sunset knew that this was going to be significantly more difficult than her previous fights, especially since they immediately split up. One–the Bonkers in yellow–charged directly at her while purple stuck to the edge of the Arena. Once again trying to test her opponents’ strategies and defenses, she sent a small magical beam purple’s way before his brother could reach her.

It barely took two seconds for the yellow-clad ape to get her in range, though. Quickly, he brought down his hammer with all of his strength, clearly intending to finish the fight early while she was presumably distracted by his brother.

It just bounced off of the shield she generated, and yellow stumbled back from the recoil.

Before Sunset could follow up with an attack of her own, though, an explosion launched her to the right, where she landed with an oof. Thankfully, it felt like her left side hadn’t been seriously injured from it–it just stung like a bitch and moving was going to be a bit painful until she could eat. Hissing in pain, she got up and stared at where the explosion had come from.

Purple stared right back, retrieved a glowing coconut from thin air, and prepared to bat it at her again.

Mentally filing away that she was going to have to watch out for ranged attacks, she refocused on the yellow Bonkers, who was charging at her again. She generated a shield in front of her and, expecting some trickery, prepped a second shield as well.

That proved to be fruitful, as the Bonkers had feinted. Instead of another head-on attack, he spun around to target her side instead, but only found his hammer bouncing off of another magical shield. Somewhat absentmindedly, Sunset also intercepted the coconut flying at her with a stream of fire as she grabbed the stumbling yellow Bonkers in her telekinesis. It took a heave of magical effort, but she sent him hurtling into the wall as well.

That really did seem to be her go-to strategy today, huh.

Unfortunately, this did not go nearly as well as her previous wall-slams. Instead of being knocked out, or even really stunned, yellow just peeled himself off the wall with the biggest shit-eating grin. “Well, Bro,” he said, “looks like we might need to put in some effort after all!”

Purple joined him in grinning, but said nothing himself. Instead, he and yellow both ran forward, and Sunset once again decided to play it defensive. She knew that she could absolutely outlast these two, so she just needed them to wait until they tired themselves out.

Then yellow jumped, using purple’s shoulders as a springboard to launch even higher into the air. The ape performed a triple somersault in the air, presumably just for the style points, before coming down right for her at the same time purple raised his hammer to strike.

The two strikes coming in simultaneously forced her to stretch her shield thinner, covering a wider area. And she could feel the difference–their hammers hitting home sent a jolt down her horn and she winced as the shield physically cracked, much like what Meta Knight had pulled off before.

The Bonkers noticed too, capitalizing off of it as hard as possible. While yellow landed deftly on his feet, purple swung back around to hit the shield again, and Sunset cried out as it shattered. Yellow wasted no time lashing out, hitting his hammer into Sunset’s left shoulder faster than she could get another shield up.

She went flying, but the Bonkers weren’t done yet. Purple swung his hammer, seemingly not really targeting anything, but as he was doing so yellow jumped up and bounced off of the hammer. He flew towards her even faster than she was moving, and Sunset’s eyes widened as his own hammer came down on her.

This one hit her in the face.

For once, Sunset was the one crashing into a wall at speed. She sunk back down to the floor, not having been in this much pain since she fought Kirby. Her left shoulder was definitely dislocated, but at least her nose wasn’t broken. Her mouth, though, was screaming in pain, and she could feel something hard on her tongue that tasted quite strongly of iron.

Shit, she realized, that’s a tooth.

It’s generally a pretty bad idea to stand on a dislocated limb, but Sunset pushed herself to her hooves anyway. She needed to quite literally make a stand here; if she lied there too long she’d be disqualified.

“Had enough yet?” Purple taunted from halfway across the arena.

Hmm, not quite, Sunset thought. She still had a few tricks up her sleeve that she’d wanted to save for the final fight, but she’d once again underestimated her opponents and needed to pull it out early. Defiantly, she spit out her knocked-out tooth and looked right at the two Bonkers.

Predictably, they charged right for her.

A wave of heat spilled off of her, sending the two of them stumbling a bit at the sudden temperature change. That was enough for her to grab yellow in her telekinesis and lift him up.

Instead of just slamming him into the wall again, she made it very clear what she was doing. Her magic wrenched open his fingers, forcing him to drop his hammer, before her telekinesis spread to his entire arm and she began pulling.

Sunset smiled at the Bonkers still on the ground. With a tooth missing and her gums bleeding, she was sure it looked rather disturbing–exactly what she was going for. “The rules state that anything nonlethal is allowed,” she stated, her voice slightly distorted from the blood in her mouth. Purple’s eyes widened in realization. “And well, as far as I know, a Bonkers doesn’t need both arms to live.”

Purple’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t dare.”

Sunset kept her smile as steady as she could when yellow yelped in pain. “Oh, I’m not sure you want to test that.” Almost as a bit of an afterthought, she sent some blood magic his way as well.

“B-bro,” yellow stuttered, his own eyes wide. “I can’t feel my arm.”

Purple glanced between his brother and Sunset a few times before he dropped his own hammer and sighed. “We yield.”

The crowd, for once, was nearly silent. It seemed that no one knew how to react to a development like this. The audience had expected quite a bit more bloodshed, not for the Bonkers to simply capitulate to the threat. It was far from honorable, but hey, it got Sunset closer to the Fountain, and that’s all she really cared about.

There was a confused smattering of applause as the Bonkers left the arena, yellow rubbing his still-numb arm while shooting a glare at Sunset. She glared right back, but as soon as they were gone she stuffed her final maxim tomato in her mouth. She was honestly getting rather tired of the taste of tomato, but hopefully this was the last of it for a while.

She tasted more of her own blood than tomato juice from this one, anyway.

She sighed in relief as the pain subsided and her shoulder relocated itself, but her eyes narrowed as she ran her tongue over her teeth. The gum had stopped bleeding and that wound had closed, but her tooth was still missing. That was…annoying.

It seemed that maxim tomatoes, as powerful as they were at bringing someone back from the brink of death, could only heal that which one’s body was already capable of healing. They just sped up the process immensely and made sure the affected area healed to perfection. Bones could be reset and fully healed, blood could be replenished, and tissue could be regenerated.

But ponies only had one set of permanent teeth, so there was nothing for the maxim tomato to work with when healing the area. It just closed up the wound in her gums and called it a day. She supposed the effect would be similar if someone lost a limb.

It was a stark reminder of the harsh realities of the universe, but it also wasn’t something she could afford to focus on at the moment. Instead she looked to the back wall. The floor had lowered the few meters it usually did, but there was no door in the back. Sunset stared at it, confused, until a thin line appeared down the entire nearly forty-meter tall wall, and the whole thing began to retract.

“Now, normally, a challenger’s final opponent before the Fountain would be the Prince,” the announcer’s voice rang out, and Sunset recalled the absolute titan of a being she’d seen through the palace window.

Oh fuck, she realized.

“But it seems we’ve had a last-minute change! An even more powerful being has taken an interest in Miss Shimmer!”

The wall had fully retracted now, revealing an utterly massive cavern behind it, so large it was shrouded almost entirely in darkness. The crowd’s cheering, meanwhile, crescendoed as the sound of a massive footstep and giant splash rocked the Arena.

“You all know him as the King of Cavius! Please welcome His Majesty, WHAM…”

A giant hand made entirely of diamond slammed down onto the floor, nearly knocking Sunset down from the vibrations alone.

“...BAM…”

A second hand hit the ground, and Sunset reflexively gulped in fear.

“...JEWEL!”

The light glinted off of a giant diamond crown, highlighting the titan’s three eyes. Ornate diamond earrings were also visible on either side along with a fanged, frowning mouth, but other than those the being’s face was still too far in the darkness to see well.

How the fuck was she supposed to take this thing down?

“BEGIN!”

Instantly, one of the diamond hands launched straight at her. It didn’t seem to be connected to any arms, so Sunset supposed that there was some magical link between the King and his hands.

As much as she would’ve liked to try and figure that magic out, she had a giant punch to worry about. She was able to dodge it fairly easily–inertia seemed to be a bit of a problem for Wham Bam Jewel–and it slammed into the ground. It still kicked up a massive plume of dust, and when that cleared Sunset’s eyes widened at the size of the crater it had formed.

“Not aiming to kill?” Really? she thought.

The onslaught was still coming, though, and she had to refocus on dodging again lest she became a smear on the floor. If either hand caught her she was definitely a dead mare.

Thankfully, the giant didn’t exactly have the best aim. Strike after strike only managed to hit the ground, Sunset escaping by the skin of her teeth every time. She still couldn’t manage to hit back, though. Wham Bam Jewel–she resolved to just shorten it to Jewel in her head, that name was way too long to be thinking–was just too far away and too hard to see to reliably target.

As she jumped out of the way of another punch, though, a thought crossed her mind. Not all of Jewel was too far away to target. His hands were rather close by, after all.

When that next ground-shaking punch hit the dirt, she had her horn already lit and a spell in mind directed at Jewel’s left hand. Unfortunately, the melting point of diamond was over three and a half thousand degrees, which wasn’t something she could reliably reach even when tapping into her cutie mark magic. Or at least, not fast enough for it to be useful in a fight.

Fortunately, she didn’t need to melt the hand. The flash point of diamond, only around nine hundred degrees, was far more attainable. Hearing Jewel wail in pain as his hand caught fire was a bit surreal. The being was so big that a sound that, on any other creature, would be rather high pitched was still a low rumble.

Quickly, Jewel retreated his flaming hand higher into the air, forcing Sunset to break her concentration on keeping it hot. He waved it around a bit to put the fire out, and as he was doing so continued attacking Sunset with his other hand.

She dodged the next strike as well, but cringed. She probably could just continually set his hands on fire until he gave up, but she was bound to screw up eventually. One mistake here could get her killed, so it wasn’t exactly a risk she was willing to take. She needed a way to get closer faster.

As her opponent’s right hand flexed and rose back out of the crater, Sunset stared at it a bit. It was shaped almost exactly like a human hand, but each individual finger segment seemed far more disconnected than a human’s. Instead of knuckles, it was almost like Jewel had the same sort of magic connecting his fingers and his palm as he did between his hand and what Sunset presumed would be his torso.

Looking at it, another idea hit her. It was risky, but she would probably be better off trying it rather than spending another half an hour or so dodging punches. As soon as she dodged Jewel’s next strike, she prepared a spell and jumped onto the hand.

Her enemy acted almost amused, and tried to get her off like how one would shoo a fly off of their arm. But she stayed right on the back of his right hand no matter how much he shook it–a powerful sticking charm on her hooves had taken care of that. That was a passive charm, at least, allowing her to instead close her eyes and focus most of her attention on feeling for that connective magic.

In the meantime, Jewel had successfully put out his flaming left hand, and was quickly moving that in to join in getting Sunset off of him, or even possibly to just crush her and be done with it. Just before he could put his hands together, though, the orange unicorn’s eyes snapped open as she found exactly what she had been looking for and, much like she had done to the tornado on Skyhigh, cast a general dispellment charm on a massive scale.

She had been expecting the hand to just collapse to the ground and fall apart, no longer tethered to Jewel himself. Instead, almost like the connective spell was an extended spring, the hand rocketed back towards Jewel’s body with Sunset still stuck to it.

She had around half a second to form and execute a new plan before a lot of things happened at once.

She could see, out of the corner of her eye, Jewel’s other hand quickly retreating as well as he tried to catch her. She quickly cast Naught Bell’s Explosion and left it behind for the hand to run into.

Once she was close enough to Jewel’s face, she disengaged her sticking charm and jumped right as she heard her explosion go off, aiming for his rightmost eye.

She could tell that she wasn’t going to make it, though. The trajectory simply hadn’t been right on the retreating hand for her to leap all the way up to Jewel’s eyes. Still, she kept her horn lit and, in desperation, tried anything to get her the extra distance.

Had the audience had a closer view, they would have been able to see a small, aquamarine five-pointed star form below Sunset’s right hind hoof. They also would have seen said star quickly move upward, knocking into Sunset herself and propelling her upward by the extra few meters she needed before the star disappeared again.

Sunset didn’t really notice how nor care why the boost had happened, though. She just knew that she was close enough to Jewel’s very wide eye now for a clear shot. With a bit of autobioturgy on her right foreleg to increase her own strength, she punched Jewel right in the eye.

He wailed in pain again, both, Sunset suspected, from his hand exploding and from getting poked in the eye at high speeds. She wasn’t quite done yet, though, since she was still falling and hitting the ground thirty some meters below was not a fun concept.

That was solved with a quick teleport and liberal application of self-levitation to bleed off the momentum. She still hit the ground rather hard, but all-in-all, she’d say that she came out of the interaction far better off than Wham Bam Jewel did. The titan was entirely missing his left hand, the diamond extremity in pieces and on the floor. His right hand was covering his rightmost eye and unable to move very far from his body, while his mouth had contorted into a grimace of both pain and anger.

Sunset, meanwhile, stood as tall as she could and grinned widely. She was practically uninjured, if a bit winded, and was proudly displaying that she would win this given enough time.

Jewel apparently saw it too, and an incredibly deep grumble resonated around the Arena. “I yield,” he declared, before a series of footsteps and splashes retreated and his face disappeared from view.

The crowd gasped, before the stands erupted into a sea of cheering.

“WHAT A MATCH!” the announcer shouted. “I’ve been commentating these matches for almost a decade, and this is the first time I’ve seen anybody take down the King! Our challenger has made history here tonight, folks, and has truly earned her reward!”

The lights in the cavern Jewel had just been in flicked on, illuminating the Fountain of Dreams. It was on a pedestal of rock several meters above a moat, which itself was filled with the water spilling out of the Fountain. A bridge connected the Arena’s floor to the Fountain’s platform, and Sunset gladly crossed it as the crowd’s cheers and applause rang in her ears. When she reached the Fountain itself, she breathed in deeply as she relished in the feeling of her magic being restored.

But something felt…wrong. She frowned as she scrubbed the blood off of her left leg. The Fountain’s magic felt dulled, almost like the Fountain itself detested being reduced to a mere reward. She was sure that the Fountain was incapable of actually feeling that kind of thing–it was an inanimate object, after all–but that was still the vibe she got from it.

Deliberately ignoring the crowd’s gasps as she reached up and summoned the Warp Star, which was a dark gray color, she flew it back up the Arena and scanned the crowd for Marx. Quickly, she directed it over to him and the spectators around him all scattered. “Get on.”

Marx grinned and hopped on, before Sunset flared her horn and teleported them both out of the Arena, leaving behind a sea of confused audience members and a disappointed announcer.

“I was going to ask for an interview…”

Author's Note

Summoning Stars: 6/8

So uh, this chapter is a bit...long. You know that room of Cavius where Kirby fights a bunch of minibosses to get their abilities? I may have gotten a bit carried away expanding on that concept. Just slightly.

I like writing fight scenes.

But partially because of that, writing the Halfmoon chapter is taking a bit longer than I initially expected. There's a few scenes in particular that I've deleted and rewritten multiple times, but I'm sure I'll have it perfected soon. I do still plan to up the upload rate to once every three days once I finish writing MWW, and I expect that the final boss fight will come easier to me. For now, though, I make no promises on publishing the Mekkai chapter except for, again, next Saturday at the latest.

Oh, and I just want to say, with this chapter, A Purple Pony Princess's Problems on Planet Popstar has officially passed the 100,000 word mark! I'd like to extend a massive thank you to everyone who's taken the time to read through this, I really couldn't have done it without you all.

So stay tuned for chapter twenty-one: Mekkai, the City in the Sky!

Chapter XXI: Mekkai, the City in the Sky

As Sunset and Marx exited Cavius’s atmosphere, the latter looked at her a bit strangely. “So, about that thing with the Bonkers…”

Sunset sighed. “Honestly, I was bluffing,” she admitted. “I don’t think I’d have it in me to actually rip someone’s arm off.”

Marx seemed oddly satisfied with her answer. “So what did you do to his arm, then?”

“I just numbed the entire thing so he thought I would rip it off,” Sunset answered. “It’s essentially just like applying a local anesthetic; doctors back home do it all the time to prevent having to put someone under.”

“Makes sense.”

They went silent for a bit, and Sunset winced as her tongue flicked over her missing tooth again. “Think somewhere on Dreamland has good dental implants?” She didn’t intend to have to return to Dreamland, of course, but it was probably a good thing to keep in mind regardless in case getting back to Equestria didn’t work for some reason.

Marx chuckled. “Maybe! I’ve never had to deal with stuff like that!”

Sunset laughed with him. “Yeah, that makes sense.” She narrowed her eyes, considering Cavius’s Fountain’s strange feeling. “Hey, you said that Popstar’s recorded history goes back two thousand years, right?”

“Right about, yeah!”

“Did…did something happen then that wiped out any records beforehand?”

Marx went quiet for a long while. “Probably,” he eventually answered. “Historians don’t really know, given the lack of actual written records. Hell, I think that book you found on Aquarius might be the most significant archeological find in centuries.”

Absentmindedly, Sunset summoned it and flipped through. “Really? I thought you said you didn’t recognize the language.”

“I don’t,” Marx reaffirmed. “But it looks similar to some really, really old untranslatable tablets that archeologists have dug up. This might be the key to translating them!”

“How so?” Sunset asked. The book was certainly no Rosetta Stone; the only language in there was that strange, blocky text. “We don’t have anything in a modern language to compare it to.”

Marx nodded. “Sure, but it has diagrams!” he retorted. “Actually, could you flip back a few pages?”

Sunset did as requested, ending on a diagram that took up both pages. It seemed to be a simplified illustration of Popstar’s system, albeit not to scale. Each planet had a label next to it, but Sunset was sure that wouldn’t be helpful in translation–whatever civilization was here before would have had different names for them. The strange thing, though, was the diagram itself.

Marx looked at it with narrowed eyes. “Well that’s weird.”

Sunset tilted her head. “Care to explain?”

“Well for one thing, Popstar only has three moons,” he started. Next to the star-shaped planet at the far side of the first page were four close circles. “And the diagram doesn’t show its rings, either.”

“Maybe the fourth moon got too close and was torn apart?” Sunset suggested.

Marx performed a surprisingly decent emulation of a shrug for a creature with no arms. “Possibly. But that’s not all,” he continued. “Look, Aquarius and Skyhigh are way larger than they should be. Mekkai’s not even there, and Halfmoon doesn’t have its moon.”

Sunset decided to power through the first two statements–those could just be issues with the scale–and focus on the planets she hadn’t been to yet. “How do you know Mekkai’s not there?” she asked. “What if they just didn’t include Halfmoon in the picture, for some reason?”

Marx shook his head. “Mekkai isn’t a sphere,” he explained, much to Sunset’s shock. “It’s a disc.”

“That…shouldn’t work gravitationally,” Sunset complained. “At all.”

“Neither should Popstar,” Marx countered. “And that’s a lot bigger than Mekkai. The leading hypothesis is that the Fountains keep it stable.”

Sunset frowned. Something had kept the gravity Earth-like on all of these miniature planets, so she supposed that it wasn’t out of the question that it was the Fountains. They were the most intensely magical things she had ever encountered, after all. Besides maybe the Element of Magic itself.

“Is Mekkai…artificial, then?” Sunset proposed. “Maybe this was drawn before it was built, if it is.”

Marx chuckled as they began to close in on their next destination. “Oh, ‘artificial’ doesn’t even begin to cover how strange Mekkai is.”

They got within visual distance of it, and Sunset’s jaw dropped.

The ordeal on Cavius had left the Equestrians entirely shell-shocked, even through most of Sunset and Marx’s conversation. Never before had they really witnessed that level of violence, with the exception of the immortals in the room. Discord, of course, had stumbled across far worse atrocities than mere gladiatorial combat in his years, and was only really shocked by the fact that Sunset managed to pull off that bluff convincingly. Even he had thought she was ready and willing to literally disarm that Bonkers.

Celestia and Luna, on the other hoof, were no strangers to bloodshed, even if Equestria had not been at war in over six centuries. The most recent conflict, outside of the short-lived Changeling invasion earlier that year, had been a small skirmish with the Dragons in CR 379, which Celestia had put an end to personally before any of her little ponies could get significantly hurt.

No, most of those two’s experience with war came from quite a bit earlier. The War of the North had been far more brutal than later history books would make it out to be. Sombra’s coup and the resultant war he waged claimed the lives of over seven hundred thousand ponies, including the entire population of the Crystal Empire–almost four hundred thousand souls had been ripped from time and transplanted to the modern day. That was even after close to a hundred thousand military deaths from the Empire, mostly slaves forced to fight under Sombra’s regime.

It was the first major conflict that Celestia and Luna led Equestria through. Several of Equestria’s northernmost villages were razed to the ground during the war, and the two of them bore witness to many horrible things over those eight long years. The recovery period after Sombra’s defeat had also been equally grueling.

Perhaps, Celestia pondered, her and Luna’s differing opinions on violent solutions stemmed from there. Her sister had always been the more combative of the two, but after the War of the North, she took to protecting the realm with gusto. A few years after the war, Griffonstone, which had been in decline for centuries following King Grover’s death, made a bid for some extra territory against a weakened Equestria.

Unfortunately for them, Luna had been in the area. She almost single-hoofedly sent them packing all the way back to Griffonstone, and for centuries the griffons had called her the Bringer of Darkness. There was even a rumor, for a time, that Luna had sent the Arimaspi to steal the Idol of Boreas, but Celestia personally found that to be a bit unlikely. Her sister had been on the Moon at the time, after all.

Hay, Luna had also practically invented the field of oneiroturgy, another attempt to be her subjects’ sword and shield, even against their own minds. The fact that her contributions to Equestria’s safety often went unseen was one of Celestia’s greatest regrets, a weight that she knew would never be truly lifted.

She had lost her sister for a millennium because of her censoring of the more regrettable parts of leadership, and had lost Sunset for almost a decade from similar foolishness. Nodding to herself, she resolved to not make the same mistake again.

“I must say,” Luna spoke up, interrupting her sister’s thoughts. “This speculation of some…horrible calamity taking place in ages past is most disconcerting.”

“What do you mean?” Rainbow Dash asked. “They said that happened two thousand years ago!”

Both Luna and Discord gave her a very pointed look.

Rainbow chuckled nervously. “Point taken.”

Rarity’s sudden gasp redirected everypony’s attention back to the screen. “My, that city puts Manehattan to shame!”

Mekkai was the single largest artificial structure Sunset had ever seen. It was a disc, like Marx had said, but that failed to put into perspective the sheer scale of it. It was upwards of a thousand kilometers in diameter–though only a few hundred meters wide. The city took up the majority of space, sprawling out from the massive, kilometer-tall skyscrapers in the center and tapering off into more generally urban and eventually suburban the further out it got. A one hundred kilometer thick ring of farmland covered the edge of the disc, and even at their distance, Sunset could make out what looked like giant high-speed rail corridors.

And that was, quite literally, just the half of it. Their angle of approach also allowed them to see the underside of the disc, which seemed just as populated, if not moreso than the top portion. But there were some…differences, Sunset noted. The top half of the disc seemed almost brighter and cleaner, while the bottom even looked grungy. Its main form of lighting looked like it was neon signs, like some sort of cyberpunk dystopia.

For the moment, though, Sunset put her concerns about Mekkai’s social structure aside and focused on the Fountain. “How much do you wanna bet that the Fountain’s right in the middle?”

“Sucker bet,” Marx replied. “Where else would it be?”

“Fair enough,” Sunset conceded, glancing down as the houses began to speed by below them. A few seconds later, they began decelerating and descended, touching down on a walkway only a few kilometers from the planet’s center. Sunset’s landings were definitely getting better with each planet, and this one was no exception–much like on Cavius, they were able to simply step off of the Warp Star before it disintegrated.

The two took a moment to look around at the area. There were a few other pedestrians around, but that wasn’t much of a concern to them. Up this close, the buildings seemed even taller than Sunset had expected. It was like someone had taken New York, Tokyo, and Dubai, merged them all together, and ramped it up to eleven. Everything around them stood upwards of a kilometer tall at the very least, but the air lacked the usual smell of cities. They had landed on a pedestrian walkway above a set of train tracks, one of which sped by below them as Sunset watched. It was definitely entirely electric, and she absentmindedly wondered how a world like this even generated renewable power.

Marx’s gasp from behind her prompted to turn around, and it seemed like that question would wind up answered. Right at the exact center of the disc stood an absolute monolith of a building, stretching so high into the sky they couldn’t see the top of it. Every path they could see led to or from one of its entrances, but the more concerning thing there were the guards in front of every door. Most were Sir Kibbles, but Sunset was able to see a few Blade Knights and Poppy Bros here and there.

The main thing that caught Sunset’s eye, though, was the giant sign above what she assumed was its main entrance. It was in Somnic, of course, which she couldn’t read, but she just so happened to have a translator around. “Hey, Marx?” she asked. “Could you read the sign?”

Marx blinked. “Oh! Of course!” Clearing his throat, he continued. “Vul Manufacturing and Energy, Incorporated. Think it’s the same Vul as the Captain?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Sunset replied. “Vul did say that he came from Mekkai.”

“Hey, maybe his family runs the joint!” Marx grinned. “I wonder if they’ll just let us in!”

Sunset frowned. “Probably not, to be honest. If Meta Knight recruited someone from here and then left, he must have thought that Mekkai’s Fountain is adequately guarded.” She chuckled. “I doubt they’d just let a couple of schmucks in just for saying that they’re gonna stop the Sun and Moon from fighting.”

Marx joined her in chuckling. “Yeah, that seems doubtful.” His expression hardened. “But the Fountain’s definitely in there. So how do we get in?”

Sunset frowned. “Well, I don’t think I can just get us in there with a wallflower spell,” she said. “And they probably have something to deal with invisible invaders, like an IR camera or something.”

“Could we tunnel under, somehow?” Marx suggested.

“That…doesn’t seem very feasible,” Sunset answered. “Neither does a full-frontal assault. Even with whatever power ups the Fountains have been giving me, I don’t think I could do that with my magic alone.”

“I’m sorry what?” Marx asked suddenly. “The Fountains have been what?”

Sunset momentarily cringed at her mistake, but very quickly smoothed her expression. She hadn’t quite meant to let Marx know that. It was going to have to come up eventually, though, so she might as well go for it now. “I think it has to do with the Warp Stars absorbing themselves into my horn,” she elaborated. “Did you really think I would’ve been able to fight Wham Bam Jewel to a standstill without an extra power boost?”

Marx opened his mouth, closed it, and seemed to consider the question for a moment. “Fair enough.” He shook his head. “That’s besides the point, though. Any other ideas?”

Sunset frowned in thought. “Maybe there is a way to access it from below,” she considered. “There has to be some way between the upper and lower halves of the city, right? They wouldn’t force people to travel a thousand kilometers just to move a few hundred meters up or down.”

“That seems like it would check out,” Marx agreed. “You think that there’s one from below up into the building?”

Sunset nodded. “It’d make sense if they have commuters from down there.”

“Would the security down there be more lax, though?” Marx pointed out.

Sunset grinned. “Well, if they have a bunch of people coming and going, what’s one more invisible blip on the records?” Her plan set, she turned around and pointed at a random pedestrian, raising her voice. “Hey, you!”

The Cappy she’d targeted looked up, surprised at her and Marx’s approach. “Me?”

“Yeah, you,” Sunset reiterated. “Is there an easy way down to the other half of the city?”

The Cappy made a face. “Yeah, but why would you want to go there?”

“We have our reasons,” Marx cryptically cut in. “But that’s besides the point. How do we get down there?”

The Cappy shrugged. “I mean, if you want to waste your time you might as well.” He pointed down the walkway. “There’s a Descent Pod a couple blocks that way.”

Sunset nodded politely at him as they passed, making their way towards the area.

The Descent Pod, Sunset decided, was not a pleasant way to travel.

It was exactly as its name implied: a large pod, not dissimilar in size from a human elevator. The travelers, after entering, would be sealed in before the pod launched downward at high speeds.

The unpleasant part came at the halfway point; the pod suddenly flipped upside down with them still inside. The passengers could still very easily tell that it flipped, but the fact that gravity also swapped directions at the same time nearly made Sunset motion sick. Luckily, she was able to recover in the few seconds it took for the pod to reach the bottom surface, but she wasn’t very much looking forward to going through it again.

Especially while maintaining a muruflos on top of it, given that she was going to have to keep them invisible somehow.

For now, though, they could look around on the underside of Mekkai. It was…honestly fairly underwhelming, Sunset thought. Sure, it was far more crowded than the upper city, but with it came the general feeling of big cities that she was used to. People of all species rushed to and fro, seemingly desperate to just get to their destinations under the almost-blinding neon lights on nearly every building.

At the very least, it wasn’t smoggy like cities on Earth had been. Cars seemed nonexistent on Mekkai; if one wanted to travel long distances they had to take a train. That was just about the only nice thing Sunset had to say about it, though. The concrete hellscape of this half of the city was somehow worse than the upper half. The buildings may have been shorter, “only” capping out at just under a kilometer, but the increased pedestrian traffic, narrower walkways, and general grime made it feel incredibly claustrophobic.

It also just felt darker, somehow. The actual light levels were about the same on both sides of the city–the disc faced Popstar edge-on, so lighting really only depended on whether the Sun was visible. It seemed to be winning against the Moon at the moment, as far as Sunset could tell from how it appeared to be day. She couldn’t quite see Popstar itself in the sky through all of the buildings.

Perhaps it was the neon giving off that vibe? They really seemed to like the style down here.

“So uh,” Marx started as they started walking, careful to avoid tripping into someone, “what exactly is your plan, again?”

They rounded a corner, another very large building coming into view. It was in the same relative location to the Vul building on the layer above, and just as Sunset suspected, far more people were coming and going here. Lighting her horn, she answered. “Well, to start off I’ll use muruflos–the wallflower spell,” she explained, applying it. They hadn’t been getting many strange looks to begin with, given the sheer number of intelligent species in the system, but now no one even noticed them.

“Whoa,” Marx grinned, “are we just invisible?”

Sunset shook her head. “Nah. It’s essentially just incredibly subtle psychoturgy to get people to…look the other way, so to speak. Hence why I can keep us able to notice each other.”

“Ah, that makes sense.” Marx turned back towards the building. “So we’re just walking in the front door, then?”

“That’s the plan,” Sunset affirmed, beginning to walk forward.

A few paces later, Marx piped back up. “So, why couldn’t we just walk in up top?”

“A wallflower spell works best in a crowd, and it ain’t gonna do shit against an infrared camera,” Sunset elaborated. “Or any camera, really. And since there was basically no one out on the streets up there, we’d get spotted pretty much instantly.” She frowned. “Actually, that’s really weird. There were like, five pedestrians we saw up there, right?”

Marx nodded. “Yeah, and five thousand down here. You’d think a city like this would have a more even population spread!”

Sunset shook herself out of her thoughts on that as they approached the door. Slipping by right behind someone, she let out a sigh of relief when no alarms went off. They were in.

Now they just had to figure out where to go.

The lobby the front door had opened into was extremely large, the size of some of the bigger ballrooms Sunset had seen back in Canterlot. Multiple hallways exited it from all sides, but what really caught her attention was in the middle of the room: a giant, ornate map of the complex. Carefully, they made their way through the crowd and stared at it.

Fortunately, Sunset’s hunch was right. The two buildings were connected through a Pod terminal in their basements. And the labels were pretty helpful, too!

“Think the giant area labeled ‘Classified’ is where the Fountain is?” Marx asked, reading off of the map of the upper building.

“Oh, definitely,” Sunset agreed. “Looks like the first few levels on both sides are manufacturing, too, but we’ll have to get through the bottom floors, first.” Unfortunately, both of the bottommost floors in either building were dedicated to security, besides the parts containing the Pod terminals.

“Eh, it shouldn’t be too bad, right?” Marx wagered. “We’ve got your fancy magic to get us through!”

As it turned out, Marx was mostly right. Getting down the stairs and onto the floor with the pod terminal was easy enough, as Sunset’s muruflos kept the security guards, mostly Sir Kibbles, from noticing them. Even getting into the Pod terminal itself was fairly easy, since one of the guards they were following entered it and they could slip in right behind them.

The problem came with getting into the Pod itself. Entering with any of the guards was right out, since the Pod flipping around would surely get them noticed. But getting the Pod open would be a different matter; they looked like they took some sort of keycard to unlock and were guarded by a much larger Kibble Blade.

“Hey, Jim!” the security guard Sunset and Marx had been following spoke up, talking to the larger member of his species. Quickly, the two unnoticeable beings rushed to the side of the room to minimize the chance of detection.

“Howdy there, Brent!” the Kibble Blade happily replied. “Going up?”

“Heh, yeah,” Brent answered back, grabbing a keycard from nowhere and scanning it. The doors opened with the sound of decompressing air and he stepped in. “I got assigned up top for this week. See ya around!”

With that, the doors slammed shut and the Pod left for the upper half of the city, while Jim began whistling a jaunty tune, none the wiser of the two creatures watching him. “Think you can crack it?” Marx whispered.

“Probably,” Sunset whispered back. “But the door opening is gonna be suspicious, and if we just fight him he’ll probably call for backup.” She lit her horn and began the subtle process of electrokinesis on the Pod’s card reader. “Can you cause a distraction?”

Marx grinned widely. “Give me five minutes.”

Decisions, decisions, Marx thought as he scurried up the stairs. He needed to cause a commotion big enough to draw the Kibble Blade away from his post, but for that he would need it to happen on the floor above them. There were so many things he could do! Attack a guard, break something, pull the fire alarm…

Hmmm… he considered as he entered the manufacturing floor. He could almost taste the tension in the air, the brewing conflict that only needed a spark to release. Guards were posted at pretty much every exit, and the less said about the workers’ states the better. All-in-all, it was rather dystopian, and not at all the kind of system Marx liked.

Perhaps he should go with attacking a guard. Or, he thought, I could go bigger.

Grateful that Sunset’s wallflower spell was still affecting him, he snuck around to a Knuckle Joe’s workstation. The Joe was scowling as he worked with a metal plate of some sort, and every so often he’d look at the nearest guard with absolute hate in his eyes. It was perfect for Marx’s plan.

Plus, sparking a revolution on Mekkai would make it that much easier to conquer once he was done with Popstar, too.

Gathering up the discarded scrap metal into a ball, he kicked it at a guard. “Vive la révolution!” he shouted as he did, slipping away just as everyone’s attention turned to the Knuckle Joe.

The guard immediately dove for him, apparently assuming that the fighter was the one who threw the ball at them, with the Joe striking back in self-defense. Another guard joined in soon after, while a second disgruntled worker took the opportunity to charge at another. Quietly, Marx slipped out of the room unnoticed as it descended into absolute chaos.

A quick trip down the stairs, and he reentered the Pod terminal as Sunset seemed to have finished up her magic and was waiting on his distraction. “So, what’d you do?” she whispered.

Marx grinned his usual shit-eating grin. “Just wait for it…”

A walkie-talkie at Jim’s side crackled on. “All units on the bottom floors, we have a situation on BF2 that requires immediate attention. I repeat, we have a situation on BF2…”

Jim grumbled at the interruption to his whistling, but left the room regardless. Sunset flared her horn and opened the door immediately, and a few seconds later they were on their way up.

Luckily, the terminal on the other side was unguarded. Whether the company was just that confident in their downstairs security or they were just busy dealing with whatever Marx had done, Sunset was unsure, but she didn’t really care. They were inside the main building undetected, and were thus able to speed their way up two floors to the first basement level of the upper building. The classified section of the map took up an area two floors tall, so it seemed that whoever had built this building had built up the floor above the Fountain.

The unicorn grinned as she exited the stairwell. The room they were in was a straight shot to where they figured the Fountain was, the opposite wall having a giant yellow sign over a door. Sunset still couldn’t read Somnic, much to her continued annoyance, but she figured that it must have been an “Authorized personnel only” sign. Of course, the door itself was guarded, as they suspected.

Unfortunately, the room they found themselves in was very loud and very crowded. It was an assembly line, though Sunset couldn’t really see exactly what they were producing. Because of the crowd, walking right up to the door and getting it open wasn’t really an option, given that that would get them discovered rather quickly. Keeping up the muruflos for this long was starting to get a bit annoying, though, so she wanted to get a solution quickly.

Her eyes flicked around, looking at the walls. It didn’t seem like there was a pullable fire alarm, so she had to go for the next best thing. She looked at the conveyor belt in the room, which was bringing in metal from downstairs. Her horn flared a bit brighter, and a large section of it spontaneously caught fire.

The workers nearest to it screamed and ran as the alarm started blaring and the sprinklers went off. Sunset and Marx quietly stepped aside to avoid getting trampled as everyone else was quick to rush out the door to avoid the flames as well. Soon enough, they were left in an empty room with nothing but a fire being doused by the sprinklers, thick, black smoke beginning to pool on the high ceiling, and the smell of burning rubber.

Sunset let the wallflower spell drop and grinned. “Alright, let’s go grab Fountain number seven.”

They made their way most of the way across the room before Sunset caught a glimpse of something that gave her pause. On one of the workbenches sat a large, golden, and eerily familiar metal claw.

Cristina Vul was not having a good day. She had just gotten out of a meeting discussing their financials, and it wasn’t looking good. Ever since her brother had left for Popstar with one of their Lobsters, the company had been in a bit of a downward spiral. She still hadn’t found someone to fill his former position of head of engineering, and she just didn’t have the knack for personal leadership that he did.

So when there was a fire in one of the manufacturing floors and an active fight spreading throughout the lower building, she felt rather justified in being absolutely pissed as she stormed to the head of security’s office. “Ronald, what the hell is going on down there?”

Ronald, a rather large Cappy, jolted up. “Ah, Cristina! Hello! Where do you mean?”

Cristina pinched the top of her beak. “Cut the shit, Ronald. I know you know what I’m talking about.”

“Well, the fight down in the lower building is still escalating,” Ronald reported. “The brawling has spread up at least two floors.”

“And the fire?” Cristina asked.

“Seems entirely standard,” Ronald replied. “The sprinklers are taking care of it pretty nicely. I feel bad for the couple of newbies that walked in right as it happened, though.”

Cristina blinked. “New hires?”

Ronald shrugged. “Seems like it. Here, look.” He pulled up the camera feed from a few seconds ago.

Cristina squinted at the screen. She had no idea what that unicorn was, and the pink one seemed more like a Noddy in a jester’s hat than anything else. “What’s the current camera look like for that room?”

“The smoke’s obscuring it,” Ronald unhelpfully pointed out while pulling it up.

“And infrared?”

The view switched, and Cristina’s eyes widened. There was the obvious hotspot of the fire, but two other blobs of heat were moving towards the back wall.

The back wall behind which was her company’s Fountain.

Acting quickly, she grabbed Ronald’s communicator off of his desk. “Intruder alert! We have two confirmed unauthorized entries on BF1 directly next to the left stairwell! All nearby units, get there and seize them!” Glaring at Ronald, she continued. “Release the Lobster.”

“You know that that’s going to cause collateral once Security gets there, righ-”

“Just do it,” Cristina ordered. “Keep those two out of the next room at all costs.”

As soon as the phrase “Intruder alert!” blared over the building’s sound system, Sunset started running. Getting caught had not been part of the plan, but they were so close now that retreat was not an option.

Unfortunately, before they actually reached the door, the ceiling opened up and a Heavy Lobster, identical to the one she had faced on the Halberd, fell in front of them. Its lifeless green eyes trained onto her and Marx, and it let out a step forward and opened fire.

Quite literally–it spewed out a flame from its claw, and Sunset and Marx scattered to avoid it. She sent a laser its way, but it just bounced off of it like the previous Lobster she’d faced. This was bad, extraordinarily so, even. They never even defeated the Lobster back on the Halberd! They had essentially gotten it to defeat itself by taking out the floor, and somehow Sunset doubted that the same strategy would work here.

Marx, at least, had immediately scampered off to hide behind something, so she could at least count on the Lobster not attacking him. He was a lot more vulnerable than she was, after all!

The robot followed up on its attack by surging forward in an attempt to ram her. She couldn’t actually get out of the way in time, and was forced to teleport to avoid it. She reappeared behind the metal monstrosity, but was disappointed to find that it had no visible exhaust pipes and thus no real weak point to attack.

The Lobster turned around quickly and was relentless, beginning its next attack before Sunset even had a chance to think about how to counter it. This one was a barrage of tiny missiles, though it was far enough away at this point that she could successfully jump out of the way to dodge. They exploded against the wall instead, creating a small, but visible dent.

That gave Sunset an idea. A few ideas, actually. The last Lobster’s targeting systems had been in its eyes, so before it could properly attack again, she created a smokescreen. That at the very least seemed to confuse it for a moment, but it didn’t last. The robot instead leapt high above her obscuring cloud, landing back down with a thud and opening fire with another set of missiles immediately.

She was too close this time to dodge them, so Sunset was forced to focus on shielding instead. It held against the missiles–although her horn was certainly feeling the strain–but the Lobster seemed ready to rush at her again.

At least until a piece of metal soared through the air and tinged against its head, dividing its attention. “Hey, tin can!” Marx shouted from across the room. “Over here!”

The Lobster turned, but Marx had already left his previous spot and was running around just outside of the robot’s range of vision. Sunset, taking advantage of the small reprieve it was giving her, began formulating a plan.

Regardless of how strange and wacky this world had been, basic thermodynamic principles still seemed to apply. No energy conversion was perfectly efficient, so the Lobster had to have some way to give off waste heat. She glanced at the large claw. Like a flamethrower, perhaps.

“Marx, throw me some of that scrap metal!” She shouted, the Lobster’s attention snapping back to her.

Marx grinned. “You got it!” he shouted back and kicked a piece of metal in her general direction. She snatched it right out of the air with her telekinesis as the Heavy Lobster opened its claw again and attempted to fire its flamethrower.

It found said flamethrower very quickly clogged, however, as semi-molten metal was forced into the gap. Said metal cooled rapidly as well, as Sunset focused as powerful of a cooling charm as she could on it.

Its flamethrower shot, the Lobster retaliated with another series of missiles as smoke covered its eyes. Unable to get out of the smokescreen in time, its shot went wide, impacting the wall again and denting it further.

It charged at her again next, and that forced her to use up more of her mana and teleport again. The Lobster bodily slammed into the wall, and the structure even loudly creaked. Sunset grinned. Even if they weren’t going to be able to get through the door normally, it seemed that taking it down was always an option.

The two quick teleports had left her a little bit drained, but Sunset’s plan seemed to be working. Even as she watched, the Lobster looked like its structural integrity was failing as it began to overheat. Its turn this time was far more sluggish, and its claw was jittery as it raised it to face her and Marx returned to her side.

Perhaps, Sunset figured, its magical protections might begin to fail as well. It attempted to use its claw–whether to launch missiles or attempt to use the inoperable flamethrower she was unsure–but she grabbed the appendage in her telekinesis and slammed it shut.

The metal legitimately deformed, rendering the claw nearly useless. Sunset’s grin grew as the robot attempted to charge them, just about the only attack it had left.

Her horn lit up with the light of the noontime sun, wrapping the entire Lobster in her aura and stopping its charge short. She lifted it into the air with a slight grunt. The magical resistances it had were still making this difficult, but it was really nothing compared to holding up a building.

Unfortunately, time was not on their side. The door slammed open as several security guards burst into the room. “HALT!” one of them shouted.

Sunset, of course, did not halt. Instead, she used the now immobilized Heavy Lobster as a battering ram, slamming it into the wall and tearing a hole straight through to reveal the Fountain. The Lobster hit the ground next to it hard, both of its legs and one of its claws getting sheared off from the impact.

Sunset and Marx moved immediately, before any of the guards could react. They leapt through the hole and sprinted for the Fountain. Much like Cavius’s, Mekkai’s Fountain felt a bit dull, Sunset noted. Unlike that one, though, this Fountain just felt…drained, really. Like power had been consistently drawn from it nearly as fast as it could regenerate.

It still created Mekkai’s Warp Star just fine, though. This one was a coppery orange, and she and Marx hopped on as soon as it was there. Smirking, Sunset gave a mock salute to the charging security guards before they teleported away.

They phased back into reality kilometers above the city, smiles still wide on both of their faces. “So, only one left and then we can summon Nova, right?”

Marx nodded and looked towards where Sunset presumed their destination was. “Yep! There’s only one Fountain left in the system.” His expression softened a bit, as if he was considering something, but he shook it off fairly quickly. “Let’s go get Halfmoon’s.”

Author's Note

Summoning Stars: 7/8

Happy Saturday, everyone! Tears of the Kingdom releasing has thrown a bit of a monkey wrench into my writing plans given that I am highly tempted to just play that, but I should still have the Halfmoon chapter done by next Saturday.

Speaking of, we're nearing the end of Milky Way Wishes! Only a few more chapters to go in this arc until we start the Dark Matter Trilogy, so for now stay prepared for the Fountains' strange magicks in chapter twenty-two: Halfmoon, the Celestial Spheres!

Chapter XXII: Halfmoon, the Celestial Spheres

“Anything special I need to know going into this?” Sunset asked. “You said Halfmoon has a moon, right?”

“Well, sort of,” Marx answered. “Halfmoon is called Halfmoon because it’s half moon. The body that everyone there lives on and its moon are around the same size. And on top of that, its moon is weird.”

“So it’s a binary system?” Sunset inquired, before blinking in realization. “Wait, what do you mean by weird?”

Marx tilted his head forward at the light they were approaching. Quickly, that one point of light split into two, allowing them to distinctly see both bodies of the system. One was a solid, terrestrial dwarf planet, a bit smaller than Aquarius. The other was a similar size, but not at all terrestrial. It looked like a giant swarm of gnats, roughly in the shape of a ball.

Interestingly, only the side of the solid planet facing its moon had vegetation on it, similar to Floria’s situation. “Are they tidally locked?” Sunset pondered aloud.

“Maybe?” Marx hesitantly answered. “I don’t really know, though.”

She sighed. “It’s inside of the moon, isn’t it. And its magic is the only thing keeping it from actually collapsing into a single object.”

“That would make sense,” Marx agreed.

“Bet it’s at the center, too,” Sunset grumbled.

Thankfully, it didn’t seem that this would take as much Warp Star manipulation as it had on Hotbeat. Despite appearances from thousands of kilometers away, the individual rocks making up Halfmoon’s moon were rather far apart, at least for the outermost layers. The further inward they got, though, the denser the debris field became.

At the surface, the rocks were kilometers apart, but soon enough they had traveled a few hundred kilometers closer to the center. Here, the rocks were becoming increasingly star-shaped, and were almost glowing. Sunset was certain that the Fountain was at the mass’s center at this point–she doubted that any other magic source could pull off something this physics-defiant.

Curiously, the closer they got to its center, the yellower the rocks got, appearing more and more like a classical five-pointed illustration of a star. It was almost as if the Fountain had constructed around it the appearance of a starfield, which was so dense at this point that Sunset had to carefully maneuver the Warp Star to avoid collisions.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity of slow, methodical movement, they breached into an open area. For they were now in a sphere of empty space, completely surrounded by the almost blindingly yellow stars. But right there, no more than fifty meters away from them and spinning lazily on another star-shaped rock, was their prize. Halfmoon’s Fountain of Dreams, not quite in the open but totally accessible to someone with a Warp Star.

Had Sunset not been so relieved by how easy it was–and honestly rather tired out from the hell of a day she’d been having–she would have noticed the trap quite a bit sooner. After all, every other Fountain had been guarded by something, but in her haste to just get a move on and summon Nova already, she launched their Warp Star forward without a second thought.

She certainly noticed when Marx collapsed beside her, though. He was out like a light, going from full wakefulness to completely unconscious in under a second.

She hadn’t the time to dwell on it, however, as the tugging sensation she felt at the base of her horn was completely overwhelming. This was no mere probe like she had felt on Skyhigh–Halfmoon’s Fountain was actively attacking her mind.

And despite her best efforts, it was winning.

She thought that she had mentally prepared herself for further mental attacks. That her experience with psychoturgy, if limited mostly to textbooks, was at least sufficient to defend herself, especially with the power boosts she’d been getting. Evidently, though, the Fountain cared not for her perceived skill or power, and she barely lasted longer than Marx did. Its mental presence smashed through her defenses, allowing it total and unrestricted access to her mind. Naught but a few seconds later, and she, too, was asleep on the Warp Star.

There, in the quietness of space, the Fountain began working its real magic. The interloper’s Mekkaian Warp Star sat still in the emptiness, floating in the void as a lightshow began around them. As one, many of the stars making up the sphere’s edge began properly glowing. Not all of them, of course–some stars remained inert yellow rocks. To any outsider, it might have seemed random.

But that was far from the case. It was an extremely inefficient storage system, of course, but the stars having two states–on and off–was very convenient for the Fountain. Even with it only being able to store one bit per few hundred cubic meters, the dwarf planet-sized computer could still encode nearly a petabyte of information. And it needed that memory for one purpose, handed down to it by its creators:

Test any Dream Wielder that approached it.

“Well that seems like a silly place to take a nap!” Pinkie Pie pointed out.

She was just about the only one who stayed calm enough to do so. Everypony else was either panicking, distracted by the background lighting up like a Hearth’s Warming Tree, or Discord. He was busy stroking his beard while peering at the screen, seemingly deep in thought. “That it is, Miss Pie, that it is…”

“Discord, have you any idea what has happened,” Celestia inquired. “I-” she grit her teeth, “understand that you cannot simply retrieve them, but your input would be…appreciated.”

For the absolute briefest of moments, Discord actually looked stunned. The moment didn’t last, though, and his usual wide grin crossed his face. “Well, you hear that, everypony?” he snarkily stated. “My input is appreciated! Maybe you girls putting in the effort to reform me was worth it after all!”

“I still maintain that such a point is debatable,” Rarity mentioned.

Discord harrumphed. “Well, the effort Fluttershy put in must have been worth something.”

Fluttershy, who at this point had taken to sitting behind the couch for ease of ducking down below it whenever Sunset’s and Marx’s adventure got intense, poked her head back up at the mention of her name. She let out a startled “Eep!” and stumbled back a bit upon her entire field of vision being taken up by Discord’s snaggletoothed grin.

“Did you hear that, dear Fluttershy?” he said. “Ol’ Celly appreciates my presence!”

“I believe that you may be just the slightest bit too focused on my word choice,” Celestia sighed. “Could you please get to the point?”

“Hold on just a moment,” Discord said, snapping his paw and setting up a tripod camera. Without actually getting up from his seat, he contorted and stretched his body so that he and Celestia were both in the frame. “I need this moment for my scrapbook!”

The solar princess took an exceedingly deep breath to calm herself. “I have had an extremely long day, so if you could cease your inanities and answer my question, I may be able to maintain the composure that I have left.”

“I think you losing composure even further would be hilarious!” Discord very plainly pointed out. “Please, go ahead and do so!”

“Ah think ya might be pokin’ a bear wit’ that one, Discord,” Applejack warned. “She might launch ya through the wall this time.”

Celestia, at this point, was making some rather inequine sounds and her sister had scooted away from her on the couch. “Thank you for the idea, Applejack.”

There was a flash of golden light, and suddenly Discord was rapidly propelled backwards towards his window. Of course, by the nature of his very existence, the window failed to satisfyingly shatter and instead stretched like it was made of rubber. With a boing, it snapped back to its upright position and launched the draconequus back into the room. He curled himself into a sphere and proceeded to ping-pong around the entire area for a solid thirty seconds, his walls and furniture lighting up and ringing like a pinball machine every time the chaos god struck them.

Eventually, he landed right back where he had been standing before, triumphantly grinning and with a seven-segmented neon purple 30,000 appearing above his head. “I think that’s a new high score! Feeling better having let off some steam?”

“A bit,” Celestia admitted.

“Great! Now on to actually addressing the sleeping unicorn on the screen,” Discord finally said, “I have to think it’s some kind of trap or test, like the other Fountains.”

“But why would it just make them pass out?” Rainbow asked. “The others all had something guarding them!”

Discord shrugged. “Maybe it’s trapped them in their own minds? Or in a simulation or something? Whatever it is, I can’t dig through their minds to display it with Void’s barrier in the way.”

Fluttershy cleared her throat.

“Also, I’m told that ponies don’t appreciate me messing about with their brains,” Discord amended.

“So what, we’re just stuck here watching them?” Rainbow groaned. “That’s so boring though!”

Discord pouted as he sat back down. “I know! And they still get to be off on their little adventure, even if this part is in their minds!”

Sunset came to on a grassy hilltop, the warmth of sun beaming down on her. She groaned as she opened her eyes and pushed herself to her hooves. Her head felt like someone was pounding a mallet on the inside of her skull–she was really getting tired of headaches–but she was awake, at least.

“Hey, Sunset!” she heard Marx shout. He was a ways down the hill, apparently having woken up before her. “You’re finally awake!”

She trotted down towards him. “How long was I out?”

Marx waved his foot in a so-so gesture. “Not too much longer than I was. Any idea where the hell we are?”

Sunset glanced around. They were in a grassy field, soft rolling hills stretching as far as the eye could see. The sky was a vibrant blue, wisps of cloud slowly drifting across it. From this angle, the hill she had woken up on seemed almost familiar, but she couldn’t quite put her hoof on it.

She winced as her headache flared up. Grumbling, she decided to go for the magical solution. Blood magic wouldn’t fix the problem entirely, but at least it would help abate the symptoms.

Of course, by the nature of this universe apparently never tiring of fucking with her, her spell worked in just about the weirdest way possible. Oh, it took care of her headache, but at the same time a blue rectangle with a gray border popped into existence in the air in front of her. Based on Marx jumping back in surprise, he saw it too.

It seemed like a window of some sort, a two dimensional texture just floating in front of them.

A Windows 95 window, to be specific.

Well, it wasn’t exactly a Windows 95 application window, Sunset supposed. The colors were inverted from the Microsoft product she had used back on Earth–Canterlot High really was just cheap enough to not upgrade their computers for a couple decades. And she wasn’t really familiar with other brands–this might’ve been more similar to Mac for all she knew.

Regardless, the real curious thing, besides the mere existence of the window itself, was the displayed information. Sunset Shimmer cast Heal, it read in white text. Sunset Shimmer gained 20 HP.

“Hey, Marx?” Sunset asked. “Am I hallucinating or are you seeing this too?”

“If you’re talking about the floating rectangle, yeah I see it too,” Marx confirmed.

Sunset sighed deeply. “The Fountain put us inside a game, somehow,” she deduced. “Are video games really a thing on Popstar?”

“The hell’s a video game?”

“Well, guess we’re up shit creek without a paddle, then,” Sunset pessimistically concluded. “‘Cause they’re not super popular on Earth, either. I know a bit about them and a tiny bit about coding, but it’s honestly pretty niche.”

“So…what now?” Marx asked. “What do you know about these?”

Sunset shrugged and gestured to the text box. “I mean, I can tell this is probably an RPG from this alone, and if I had to guess, we’re gonna have to ‘beat’ the game to escape.”

“What does that entail?” Marx prodded as the box began to fade out of existence.

Sunset frowned. “Probably beating a final boss, or something.” She groaned. “But that could take hours.”

Marx grinned and jumped up onto her back. “Well, we better get started, then!”

With a simple series of notes, another text box popped up. Marx has joined the party!

Sunset chose a random direction and started walking, glaring at the box that stubbornly remained in the middle distance of her sight. “Well, those are going to get very annoying very quickly.”

“Could you control them consciously?” Marx offered.

“Might as well give it a shot,” Sunset replied. After a moment of concentration, the text box turned into a far more vertical rectangle. This one was adorned with a multitude of options. The ones that Sunset was most interested in, though, were Party, Map, and Inventory.

It wasn’t too dissimilar to how she could control the Warp Stars, Sunset realized. She could simply will the menu into existence and for certain options to be selected. Selecting the Party option brought up a second menu, this one displaying two sprites, one of her and one of Marx. To the side of both images were full red bars, reading 80/80 HP for her and 100/100 HP for Marx. Sunset’s image also had a blue bar beneath it, this one slightly emptied and reading 81/100 MP. Finally, far to the right of both of their health bars were their names and, in small text underneath each of them, (Mage) for Sunset and (Fighter) for Marx.

As they watched, Sunset’s MP bar ticked up to 82/100. Huh, I guess it recharges over time, she reasoned. Curious, she checked if she could interact further with her sprite, which brought up a third menu, which had three connected circles. The center held a large, gray circle containing an image of a wand, to its left was a green circle with a plus sign on it, and on the right was an orange circle stylized to look like a fireball.

This, at least, was something that Sunset vaguely recognized.

“I have a skill tree?”

Sunset was grumbling to herself as she and Marx walked towards the nearest town. The Map option in the menu had had a large glowing icon over a nearby town called Lumbridge, so Sunset guessed that that was where the Fountain wanted them to go. In the meantime, she had looked over both her own and Marx’s skill trees. The results were…less than ideal, in her opinion.

“Why do you get two offensive moves right off the bat?” she disgruntledly muttered.

Marx skipped forward. “No idea! Maybe the Fountain thinks you’re a healer?”

Sunset grumbled a bit. “Please, I know two healing spells. Both of which are extremely basic.”

Before she could argue further, however, a rustling in the tree above them drew their attention. What Sunset had thought had been a particularly bright cluster of leaves suddenly blinked and fell to the ground, the slime-like creature landing on the path in front of them. Immediately, time seemed to freeze. Everything around them faded into the background save for Sunset, Marx, and the creature.

Sunset tried to move, but it seemed that she was stuck completely in place. She couldn’t even talk, and Marx seemed to be in the same boat. The creature had frozen too, at least, as a new text box appeared in front of them.

Green Slime appeared!

The text faded away, and a health bar appeared over the slime reading 50/50. Before them was another menu with three options: Fight, Item, and Flee. Finding that she was able to mentally control the menus again, Sunset quickly chose the Fight option, selected her fireball attack, and waited. It seemed like Marx had to choose his own attacks.

After a moment, she started moving again, though outside of her own control. It was almost as if she were just watching herself charge up a spell through her own eyes without any input–it was extremely strange. Still, she launched the fireball at the slime and mentally grinned as it connected, dropping its health by quite a bit.

Sunset Shimmer cast Fireball!
Green Slime took 31 damage!

The slime moved next, squelching its way forward a bit and lobbing a green ball of its own body at them.

Green Slime used Slime Spread!
Sunset Shimmer took 5 damage!
Sunset Shimmer was slowed!
Marx took 4 damage!
Marx was slowed!

As confusing as the entire situation was, at least it looked like it would be over as soon as Marx moved, as he rushed forward and rammed the slime with a spinning kick.

Marx used Spin Kick!
Green Slime took 29 damage!
Green Slime was defeated!
Green Slime dropped Green Slime Core!
Green Slime dropped 38G!
Sunset Shimmer gained 20XP!
Marx gained 20XP!

And just like that, the surreal experience was over as Sunset and Marx regained full control of their bodies and were back on the path, sans the slime. The former pursed her lips and looked around. “That was the strangest experience of my life,” Sunset claimed.

Marx shivered a bit. “Yeah, mine too.”

Trotting over to where the slime was, Sunset picked up the core it had dropped. Immediately, it vanished, and she presumed that she would be able to access it from her inventory if she needed it later. Looking back up, she saw a figure running towards them and promptly had to do a double take.

It was a human.

The figure didn’t exactly speak as they approached. Instead, they opened their mouth and a text box appeared before them once again. “Ho, travelers!” it read, “good work dispatching that Slime!”

Now that they were closer, Sunset could clearly see that the figure was holding a sword. His dialogue was quickly replaced with more text as she analyzed the situation. “I am Galberk, a guardsman of Lumbridge. You may be tired after your battle–here, take these!”

You gained Health Potion x3!
You gained Mana Potion x3!

Sunset found herself unable to verbally reply, much as she wanted to. Instead, she felt locked into only a few possible ways to answer Galberk. “Lumbridge?” she eventually asked.

Galberk pointed with his sword. “‘Tis a town just a few more minutes down this path. It was a great resting area for weary travelers, but recently we have been under siege by the Great Dragon’s forces.”

Now this sounded like final boss material. And for once, this game’s arbitrary limitations actually lined up with what Sunset wanted to say. “Great Dragon?”

Galberk changed where he was pointing, thrusting his sword in the direction of a massive mountain that Sunset somehow hadn’t noticed before. Clouds swirled around the top of it and smoke drifted from a cave near the summit. “The Great Dragon showed up a few months back and has been terrorizing our villages ever since. Try as we might, we cannot be rid of him.” Resting the tip of his sword back on the ground, he continued. “Ah, but that should be of no concern to you. Thanks to us guardsmen, you’ll find good food and a place to rest in Lumbridge for as long as you need!”

At that, he shut up and the text box disappeared. Galberk was now unmoving, staring unblinkingly into the middle distance. Somewhat cautiously, Sunset and Marx glanced at each other. “So…you think this Great Dragon is the final boss you mentioned?” Marx asked.

Sunset sighed. “Probably. Let’s just get into town and see if there’s a quick way through to end this.”

Unfortunately, there was not.

According to the motel operator they spoke to while looking for somewhere to base their operations for the time being, the mountain was surrounded by a giant barrier. It could be broken, but only if one were to travel to four locations around the countryside to disable the barrier manually, and no one had been brave enough to try it.

Sunset could absolutely tell that the game was railroading them at this point. One could clear the “quest objectives” in any order, but all four would have to be completed before they could dispel the barrier and access the final boss.

It was incredibly annoying, but she and Marx decided to just suck it up and go for it. The first goal they decided to work towards was a castle to the southeast that had been surrounded by a perpetual thunderstorm, and they set out as soon as they could.

The journey was long and grueling and–Sunset found–quite boring. It was mostly just random encounter after random encounter, the vast majority of which were easily-dispatched slimes. They did encounter a few Blue Slimes, which had double the HP and were quite a bit stronger than their green counterparts, but the most interesting thing that happened on their way to the castle was figuring out how leveling up worked.

Every time either of them leveled up, they would gain “skill points,” which they could then spend on unlocking more of their skill trees. It was tedious and yet another annoyance, but by the time they made their way to the castle gates they had an appreciable set of skills under their belts.

Sunset had added a lightning spell to her repertoire, along with making her fire spells bigger and better and improving her healing to also be able to target Marx. She’d also picked up a status spell, being able to now inflict poisons upon her enemies. Marx, on the other hand, had gained quite a few new footboxing moves and one particular move that made him nearly impossible to actually hit.

At least leveling up also provided general permanent buffs as well–Sunset was now sitting pretty with 98 total HP and Marx at 113. They’d found the crafting menu as well, which was quite helpful for maintaining Sunset’s MP; she’d been burning through it with every spell cast, but both slime core items could be crafted into those nifty little mana potions.

They would’ve made her life a hell of a lot easier if those actually existed outside of this game world, but she digressed. Right now they had a castle to storm.

Sunset glanced up at the gates and the stormy skies above them. As overdone as she felt rain had been on this adventure, this really just felt like a mockery of it. The raindrops were just textures that vanished before they even reached them, and the clouds themselves were a static texture that didn’t even fully obscure the unmoving noontime sun.

“So, we just go in, figure out how to disable this section of the barrier, and move on?” Marx clarified.

“And that’ll probably involve a boss fight,” Sunset added. “Plus whatever puzzles or enemies are in there already.”

Marx grinned his usual grin. “Let’s get started, then!”

The two crossed into the castle, and their worlds immediately went black for a few seconds. Before either could truly start to panic, though, their bodies strutted forward into a grand stone entry hall, similarly to how they moved without their input in battles. They regained control only a few moments later, however, and Sunset took the opportunity to look around.

The room they were in had two levels, a staircase on either side leading to the upper indoor balcony. Directly in front of them was a locked door, and directly above that on the upper level was a far larger, equally as locked door. If Sunset wagered a guess, she’d peg that as the doorway leading to their goal. On either side of the staircases were two entirely unlocked doors, and from the ceiling a giant chandelier was hung.

“Left or right?” Marx asked.

Sunset shrugged. “Well, going left didn’t really help last time we had a choice like this. Wanna take the right path?”

“Good enough for me!” Marx agreed, and the pair made their way to the right door.

Two stairwells, seven fights with skeletons, and a whole lot of walking later, and Sunset surmised that they really should’ve gone left. The right path was a maze filled with dead ends and traps, and by this point they were on the third floor of the castle but no closer to finding the key that they needed. At this rate Sunset was suspecting that this maze really was entirely pointless, but as they rounded a corner just after getting out of a fight with two skeletons, something caught her eye.

“Hey, Marx?” she called. “You might want to take a look at this.”

Marx curiously joined her in staring at the corner of the wall. By all means, it was mostly a standard outer corner; the walls were perpendicular to each other and they were on the exterior angle.

Or, at least, they would have been perpendicular had their textures actually met.

Instead, the exact corner of the wall was entirely a stormy gray, revealing the skybox through the improperly placed geometry. What was best about it, though, was that it gave Sunset an idea.

Video games were rather niche on Earth, at least ever since the home console market crashed in 1983, but PCs had brought a bit of a resurgence to the medium in the last couple of decades. Speedrunning was at least large enough that Sunset had stumbled across a few when she had been absorbing as much of Earth’s culture as she could, and there was usually one constant among them: clips.

That last fight had gotten her enough XP to level up again, finally getting her HP up to triple digits–a cool 102–but more importantly it had netted her more skill points. The next spell she had been looking at unlocking was a gravity spell. In battle it would have had very little use, only affecting flying enemies, but outside of battle it could also be used to either strengthen or diminish the effects of gravity to, say, make a jump one ordinarily could not. Like down a floor and into a currently inaccessible area after clipping through a wall.

“I mean, this is weird,” Marx said, “but uh, how exactly does this help us?”

Grinning, Sunset pulled up her skill tree and unlocked the spell she was after. “Well, for one thing, the room we’ve been trying to get to should be below us and a bit forward directly through the corner, so if I aim right we can skip right to the boss!”

Marx blinked and looked between the gap in the corner and Sunset a few times. “I’m sorry, but how exactly are we supposed to fit through that?”

“Like this.”

Sunset Shimmer cast Gravity Manipulation!
The effects of gravity were reduced for 1 minute!

Sunset proceeded to run right at the corner, slam into it, and bounce off.

Marx snickered. “Yeah, sure, you got through that real well.”

Sunset rolled her eyes as she picked herself up and dusted herself off. “I just had the positioning off, give me a moment.”

Repositioning herself, she charged the corner again. This time, she successfully clipped through and jumped for where she expected the boss to be. Looking down, she searched for the room she was looking for as she began to slowly fall. Fortunately, the walls and ceilings were only textured on one side, so she could see right into the boss room. There were two static figures inside, both humanoid. One was a short being dressed in classic witches’ garb and wielding a staff, while the other was a much taller and broader creature holding a massive sword and clad entirely in thick plate armor.

Unfortunately, it seemed like Sunset wasn’t going to make it. Her spontaneous jump was just a few decimeters short, and she desperately reached out with her hoof to try just about anything to get in. A few moments later, she felt like her hoof impacted something, even though it seemed to just be resting on open air. Her world went completely black again for a couple seconds, and then she and Marx were suddenly warped into the room.

“So, you defeated my puppet,” the witch said as they walked in from where the (still closed) door was. “No matter, your journey ends here.”

The other figure raised their sword. “The Great Dragon sends his regards.”

Immediately, they were launched into a proper fight, the background distorting and their health bars appearing.

Kalinya, the Witch of Blackridge Castle and Vantu, the Knight of Blackridge Castle attack!

Looking at her options, Sunset took stock of the fight. She and Marx at least had full health and she was at 100 MP–leveling up had healed her and Marx barely ever got hit by anything–but Kalinya had 250 HP and Vantu was sitting all the way up at 400. It looked like they would have to whittle them down until they could actually defeat them. Considering for a moment, Sunset made her selection.

Kalinya cast Embolden!
Vantu’s attack increased!
Sunset Shimmer cast Lightning Barrage!
Vantu took 137 damage!
Vantu was paralyzed!
Marx used Sneak Strike!
Kalinya took 103 damage!
Marx’s evasion increased!
Vantu used Heavy Strike!
Sunset Shimmer took 58 damage!

At that, the turn ended, and Sunset was suddenly very concerned. She had absolutely no idea if she would legitimately straight-up die if she ran out of HP, but it wasn’t something she was willing to chance. Resolving herself to just using healing items until Marx could whittle down the enemies’ health, she selected her choice.

Kalinya cast Imprison!
Sunset Shimmer was immobilized!
Sunset Shimmer is immobilized and cannot move!
Marx used Sneak Strike!
Kalinya took 101 damage!
Marx’s evasion increased!
Vantu is paralyzed and cannot move!

If Sunset was capable of it at the time, she would’ve let out a sigh of relief. She didn’t expect the enemy to just be able to entirely immobilize her, but at least the paralysis status effect kicked in at just the right time and Marx would hopefully take down Kalinya this turn.

Kalinya cast Deflect!
Sunset Shimmer used Health Potion!
Sunset Shimmer gained 58 HP!
Marx used Sneak Strike!
Kalinya deflected the attack!
Vantu took 47 damage!
Marx’s evasion increased!
Vantu used Heavy Strike!
Vantu’s attack missed!

Just like that, the two of them suddenly had the advantage. Sure, Kalinya could deflect Marx’s attacks, it seemed, but Marx would just take her out if she ever stopped. And she would have to eventually, assuming that their enemies actually used MP like Sunset did.

Kalinya cast Deflect!
Kalinya’s cast failed!
Sunset Shimmer used Lightning Barrage!
Vantu took 134 damage!
Marx used Armor Breaker!
Vantu took 82 damage!
Vantu was defeated!
Vantu dropped Knight’s Scimitar
Vantu dropped 593 G!
Kalinya became enraged!
Kalinya’s attack increased!
Kalinya’s speed increased!
Kalinya’s defense decreased!
Kalinya’s resistance decreased!

Sunset mentally grinned to herself. One more turn and they definitely had this in the bag.

Kalinya cast Firestorm!
Sunset Shimmer took 39 damage!
Marx took 102 damage!
Sunset Shimmer cast Fireball+!
Kalinya took 46 damage!
Kalinya was defeated!
Kalinya dropped Witchwood Staff!
Kalinya dropped 648 G!
Sunset Shimmer gained 340 XP!
Sunset Shimmer reached Level 7!
Marx gained 340 XP!
Marx reached Level 6!

The battle over, Sunset and Marx once again regained control over their bodies. Both of them sighed in relief as Sunset pulled up the skill trees to see where to spend their skill points. Neither expected that last attack to be that powerful, but at least they survived. “Ooh,” Marx said, looking at the menu. “That one looks good.”

“Style Kick?” Sunset asked. The move seemed like a fairly standard kick with similar damage to Sneak Strike and a similar effect–this one decreased the opponent’s accuracy instead of increasing one’s own evasion, though. “Man, you really just can’t get hit, huh.”

“Nope!” Marx happily replied. “Hey, maybe I’ll get to try it out on that thing!”

Ahead of them, a door leading out of the room had opened, revealing a glowing blue node of some sort sticking out of the ground. Well, that’s one hell of a quest objective, Sunset mentally noted. As they trotted into the room (which contained nothing but what they presumed to be whatever was keeping the barrier up), Sunset shrugged. “Why the hell not.” She selected the option, and Marx's skill points decreased as the spell was unlocked.

Marx grinned and launched forward, a few sparkles around his feet appearing as he traveled. He almost flew through the air, impacting the barrier node only a few moments later.

As soon as he did, the world froze.

Only for a couple of seconds, though, before time resumed and a soft golden glow appeared over the entire floor, small particles floating up around them. “That…was weird,” Marx noted, looking at where the barrier node used to be. The object was just entirely gone, with not even an animation for its destruction. But in turn, the entire world almost felt slower.

Sunset frowned. “Hey, would you mind trying that move again?” she asked. “Just on a wall or something; I want to test something.”

“Eh, sure, why not?” Marx answered, using Style Kick once again.

This time, the freeze was much faster, right as he used the kick. Again time froze for a few seconds before everything resumed and Marx hit the wall. “What even was that?” he asked.

Sunset frowned. “I think we’ve managed to actually lag the game,” she explained her hypothesis. “It’s trying to load too many particles at once.”

“And is that a bad thing?” Marx asked.

Sunset frowned even deeper, the gears in her head churning. “Maybe not. Whatever the Fountain is doing to keep us in here, it has to keep the game running, right?”

“That would make sense,” Marx replied. “You’re the expert here.”

“Not by any stretch of the word,” Sunset countered, “but I know enough. I’d bet that the Fountain has contingencies in place to save whoever it puts in here in the event of a crash, so if we force one…”

“You know what, I’m not even going to pretend I know what that means and just go along with whatever plan you have.”

Sunset pulled up the menu again–which also took a bit of time to properly load–and selected her choice for her skill points: a spell that amplified all other party members’ moves. Casting it, she looked back at Marx. “Alright, try it again.”

Another Style Kick, and another lag spike. This time the world stayed frozen for a solid six seconds. They tried again, and this time it felt like the whole thing was starting to come apart.

“On- --re ti-e!” Sunset exclaimed as much as she could with the sledgehammer they were taking to the framerate.

Marx performed another Style Kick, and this time their desired result came to pass. After upwards of thirty, extremely anxiety-inducing seconds of the world being frozen, Sunset’s vision went white.

FountainGame.exe terminated with error code 04: OutOfMemoryException

“Got any skips, Pinkie?”

“Nope! Go fish, Dashie!”

“You know, when I suggested that we play cards to pass the time, I was expecting something a bit more…oh, how shall I put this,” Rarity said, looking down at the absurd collection of cards in her hoof, “...refined? Like Bridge, or maybe Poker.”

“Ta be fair, yer the one who asked Discord for a deck of cards,” Applejack replied with her classic raised eyebrow. “Ah’m not quite sure what you expected. Oh, and Ah’m biddin’ three, by the way.”

Rarity tutted a bit and narrowed her eyebrows at her hoof as she tried to parse what she was supposed to even do when her queen of hearts spontaneously grew arms and legs, jumped out of her hoof, and started demanding her head on a platter, but fortunately for her the absurd game was cut short. Starlight’s sudden cry of “They’re awake!” distracted everypony else.

Discord sprang out of a lump of charcoal he’d turned himself into earlier, sending the substance just about everywhere as he retook his space on the couch. “Oh goody! I was getting tired of seeing just how much I could tweak fundamental constants before atoms destabilized!”

Everypony scooted a little bit away from him.

He rolled his eyes. “I’m kidding. I was counting how many Carbon-12 atoms are in twelve grams of the stuff.” He waved his paw dismissively. “Besides, I figured out my limits on completely breaking physics a long time ago.”

“That, um, doesn’t really make ponies feel any more secure,” Fluttershy pointed out quietly.

Discord blinked in surprise, but before he could reply Sunburst’s groan cut him off. He’d fallen asleep (and nearly fallen onto Starlight), though the latter’s loud announcement woke him up rather quickly. He brought a hoof up to his temple to massage it. “By Celestia’s starry mane, I should not have drank that much,” he muttered as he gratefully accepted the glass of water that Discord quietly snapped in.

Celestia herself raised an eyebrow at him at the expression, but her attention was quickly drawn to the screen. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, “but the previous Fountains tended not to glow, correct?”

That snapped everypony’s attentions there as well. “Well now,” Discord grinned, “this might just get interesting!”

“Well, I’m glad your hunch was right!” Marx said as he and Sunset awoke, still on their Mekkaian Warp Star.

Sunset yawned. “Yep, glad to see we’re still in one piece.” She looked forward, narrowing her eyes at the increasing glow the Fountain was giving off. Its magic somehow felt angry, which was a feat in and of itself by Sunset's standards. Slowly, she backed them off a bit. “But something tells me that we weren’t supposed to do that.”

Something rushed past them, one of the large, star-shaped rocks just missing slamming into them. It came to rest between them and the Fountain, and was soon joined by many of its brethren. Fortunately, it seemed that they all were avoiding the Warp Star, but it resulted in a thick, fairly solid sphere surrounding the Fountain and preventing entry. It was far from the entire moon condensed down to the one sphere, but it seemed that every rock within a few kilometers had been brought together for the Fountain’s protection.

The entire assemblage gave out a low rumble as it began flashing. From behind the sphere rose first a great, purple, reptilian head, followed by two giant front claws and the creature’s blue wings. Sunset couldn’t see its back, but could see the dragon’s massive tail fade into existence, wrapping around the bottom of the sphere of stars.

The Great Dragon let go of the sphere, took flight, and let out an ear-splitting roar.

“Okay so maybe cheating the system wasn’t the best idea,” Sunset admitted.

Power coalesced in the dragon’s maw, forming several new star-shaped projectiles–these far brighter than the moon’s constituent rocks–that it shot at them. Both Sunset and Marx let out a surprised yelp and the former mentally yanked the Warp Star down and out of the way of the attack. The dragon followed up with a rush forward and managed to nick the side of the Warp Star with its claws, shattering the vehicle and sending Sunset and Marx sprawling onto the new surface surrounding the Fountain.

The dragon whirled around and roared again, lashing at them with its tail. It failed to connect though, as Sunset generated a massive shield for it to slam into. The appendage ricocheted off of the magical barrier, actually forcing the massive creature to stagger back and narrow its eyes. It might’ve caught them off-guard, but by now Sunset had a plan.

Her grin split her face as her horn grew ever brighter. At this point, she’d absorbed seven different Warp Stars. She realistically had no idea exactly what that entailed, sure, but what she did know was that it was keeping her feeling on top of the world, like she could even take on an alicorn and win.

The dragon prepared another attack, but Sunset really didn’t care about the specifics of it at this point. As much as the Fountain had presumably created the Great Dragon, it was powering her just as much, too. And outside of the game world it had created, this fight was on their terms.

Before the dragon could release its attack–more star-shaped projectiles–Sunset teleported directly behind it. In an explosion of aquamarine light, the creature was forced downwards towards the Fountain at absurd speeds as Sunset hit it physically with a magic-enhanced punch. Even with as much power as she could feel the Fountain allowing her to draw from, she figured that the Fountain would have made its creation fire-resistant, so she avoided her favorite spells.

But she was far from done. Another teleport, and this time she struck it in the face. A third teleport forced it left, away from where Marx was standing on the surface. A final, fourth teleport and Sunset was back behind the Great Dragon, this time hitting it with a massive, Fountain-powered Naught’s Bell Explosion.

It never really stood a chance.

The construct slammed down into the sphere of star-shaped rocks, shattering most of them and blasting away a significant proportion of the protecting sphere on impact. Without whatever computer the Fountain used, it flickered out of existence as Sunset levitated herself back onto the surface next to Marx. She was panting a bit from the exertion, but her wide smile still crossed her face.

Marx didn’t say anything for a few seconds, only staring at the hole she’d excavated in the shield using the dragon. When he did speak, he only had one response.

“Holy shit.”

Sunset tossed her mane. “Feels good to be back in business. Those in-game spells were so limiting.”

“Yeah, I can…see that,” Marx replied, his voice almost seeming deadened. He shook it off extremely quickly, though. “Welp, we’ve got a Warp Star to grab!”

“Last one, right?” Sunset clarified as she trotted towards the hole, Marx close behind her. “How do we even summon Nova, anyway?”

They jumped down towards the Fountain. “Well, the legends all say something of the order of ‘When the Summoning Stars are gathered’ or the like,” Marx said. “I’d really guess that it would have something to do with you, since you’ve been absorbing the things.”

Sunset considered that as she reached up to touch the Star Rod. Halfmoon’s Warp Star was, similar to Floria’s, green, though a far lighter shade. Unlike the forest planet’s, this Warp Star was far lighter, almost akin to silicon computer chips Sunset had seen back on Earth.

That was another thing. The Fountain may have let them keep their natural forms, but all of the NPCs in that game world had been human. Its creators had to have known about the species, and Sunset’s mind began churning with ideas. Perhaps this was in the same universe as Earth.

She frowned as she and Marx boarded the Warp Star. No, that probably wasn’t it–the physics were just too different for that to be right. Perhaps then, this universe had its own version of Earth?

She shook her head and snorted. It probably wouldn’t matter anyway. She hadn’t seen or heard of any humans on Popstar, so trying to find if this universe’s Earth had a mirror back to Equestria would be a fool’s errand anyway.

Before her thoughts could continue further, though, their Warp Star suddenly moved without her input. With naught but a moment to notice that, they vanished.

Author's Note

Summoning Stars: 8/8
The Wish-Granter Awaits

A quick note on how the Earth Sunset was dropped in differs from our own, because it came up this chapter. There are two main differences: the first is that Ohio has a fourth large city that starts with C. Joining the ranks of Columbus, Cincinnati, and Cleveland is Canterlot, Ohio, at the junction of I-70 and I-77.

The second difference is that Fusajiro Yamauchi decided to not sell playing cards in 1889. Thus, Nintendo never existed, and when the home console market crashed in 1983, there was no Super Mario Bros. to save it. Arcades remained the main way people played video games until the late '90s, when PCs got powerful enough that developers actually started looking into gaming as a serious market again. In that version of Earth, Microsoft was the first company to get a seriously competitive home console on the market again, but not until 2002. Thus, video games were still a rather niche hobby when Sunset arrived in 2005, but the first 3D titles, which were coming out around that time, were janky as hell and had glitches galore for speedrunners to exploit, and that hobby grew to be one of the defining parts of the gaming community in that world.

But all that has little to do with the story itself, so here in the author's notes that little tidbit will remain. I will mention quickly, though, that had Sunset and Marx completed the game as the Fountain intended, the doll from the Computer Virus fight would have appeared. That's the doll that Kalinya was referring to in her pre-fight cutscene. For now, though, true intentions are soon to come to light, as Sunset and Marx can now summon Galactic Nova.

The hour of betrayal grows near in chapter twenty-three: Milky Way Wishes.

Chapter XXIII: Milky Way Wishes

They reappeared well outside of Halfmoon’s gravitational influence, thousands of kilometers away and, at this point, hundreds of thousands of kilometers from Popstar itself. They were far enough away now that Popstar’s apparent size was so small that they could properly see behind it. When Sunset had looked back earlier, the star-shaped planet had covered the entire field of view, but now, reappearing in the void of space looking back in that direction, she felt her jaw drop at the sight.

Behind Popstar, beyond the smattering of stars visible within its own galaxy, was a long, thin, and curved group of blue stars. Craning her neck up to look further, Sunset could see that the spiral arm began in a far yellower, long glob of stars. More blue stars could be seen on either end, and she finally registered what she was seeing up close.

In front of them, taking up seventy percent of the half of the sky they could see, was a giant, barred spiral galaxy.

“It looks beautiful, right?” Marx asked.

Wordlessly, Sunset nodded.

“People on Popstar call it ‘The Heavenly Light,’” Marx mentioned. “It’s really a shame that Dreamland is on the side of the planet facing away from it.”

Sunset took a long breath, just staring at the galaxy for a bit. Eventually, she did draw something from Marx’s statement. “Popstar doesn’t rotate?”

“It does,” Marx explained, “but its axis goes through the center of the star.”

“Right, sure,” Sunset said, at this point just giving up on rationalizing this absurd system. “Now we just have to figure out how to summon this thing.”

She lit her horn, just to prepare to cast anything in general, before her eyes went as wide as dinner plates. She could feel the Warp Stars prod, as if politely asking for access to her magic. Mentally giving a shrug, she figured that this was the way forward and let them in.

Overcome by a strange sensation, she was unable to stop herself as her magic flared. Marx was bodily launched away from her, sent careening backwards through space. Power swirled around her as her eyes glowed aquamarine and she began floating above the Halfmoonian Warp Star. Seven more times her power flared, each recreating a previous planet’s Warp Star. First, the coppery orange of Mekkai, then the stone gray of Cavius. Hotbeat’s was next, followed by Skyhigh’s, Aquarius’s, and Floria’s. Finally, the blindingly yellow form of Popstar’s Warp Star manifested, completing a circle around her.

The eight Warp Stars spun around her twice, once in each direction, before collapsing into one, giant, aquamarine Warp Star in front of her. The Star itself seemed to even have decorative wings, and the top spur was angled in such a way it seemed almost like a gun. Tentatively, Sunset reached out towards the Warp Star.

As soon as her hoof came into contact with it, she let out a cry of surprise. She could feel the Warp Star sapping her magic for something, but it didn’t come with the pain that that would normally entail. Instead, it felt almost like an extension of her own horn, as if she was simply using an everyday spell. It was just that, instead of her power flowing through her horn, it was moving through her hoof and into the Warp Star, instead.

At least, it felt like a normal spell until the sapping became somewhat painful as the Warp Star actually executed whatever it was charging for. It wasn’t a terrible pain–far from it, even–but Sunset was certain that, had she tried something like this without the Warp Star, the magical backlash would have killed her. She wasn’t even quite sure what it was doing, just that it was powerful.

Before long, a bright blue beam fired from the gun-like protrusion. It came to a stop somewhere Sunset estimated to be around three thousand kilometers away, where space itself suddenly cracked. As if spacetime had become as fragile as glass, the crack spread and spiderwebbed until it shattered entirely in a star-shaped hole. The light it released was blinding, but Sunset just could not bring herself to look away as the space within the crack was replaced by a giant, roughly spherical object around the size of Earth’s moon. The space behind it resealed itself, like the universe rejected such a hole in it, and the light from whatever realm the object had come from faded, allowing Sunset to see it in its entirety.

The celestial object was yellow, and now that she could properly see it Sunset could tell that it wasn’t quite a sphere. It was more a hemisphere, but the myriad of giant objects protruding from it were odd, to say the least. A compass, stopwatch, moon-sized piano keys, a telescope, and a massive chicken-shaped weather vane were just the beginning of the oddities. Most stunning was its face, a cat-like mouth sitting beneath two continent-sized blue eyes. Its left eye was squinting, seeming to be forced shut by the hole above it, like it had sustained serious damage before being sealed wherever it had been.

This was the Galactic Nova, an ancient, planet-sized, wish-granting machine. And Sunset’s ticket out of here.

Panting, the orange unicorn stared up at the behemoth. The mere idea that a civilization could exist that was so absurdly powerful to have built this, for it did indeed appear artificial, was so existentially horrifying that she had to actively choose to ignore it. She was sure that she only had one shot at this, so she had to make it count. To hell with the Element of Magic, to hell with that poor feeling in her chest when she thought of leaving Twilight and Spike behind, and to hell with fixing whatever weird problems this universe had. She was getting back to Equestria.

“READY. \n” Nova rumbled, not so much speaking as simply projecting its presence to the entire universe. Such was its power over the very fabric of reality, it could even sew a line break into its speech. “I WILL GRANT YOU ONE WISH. \n”

Sunset opened her mouth, and for a brief moment, no sound came out of it. She tried to tell it her wish, but some annoying part of her mind was keeping her from speaking. And it wasn’t even pragmatic! It was that same part of her that insisted that leaving behind the others was morally wrong, and that she at least had an obligation to bring them back too. And even though she hated it, that part of her felt like it was winning.

She glanced back, and her eyes widened again. Marx was still too far away to shout at them, but was rocketing back towards her with wings she never knew he had. Whipping her head around to face Nova once more and panicking a bit, she shouted her wish.

“I wish for a way back to Equestria!”

Nova’s eyes lit up, and it began calculating.

Discord’s living room once again erupted into a chaotic mess, and he was still baffled that he’d found a form of chaos that he actively disliked. Blasphemous, he knew. But this chaos was angry, almost riotous. Twilight’s friends had suddenly fallen into a pissed-off, hysterical, or otherwise distraught frenzy at Sunset’s declaration.

“That two-timin’, snake-oil sellin’, no-good varmint!” Applejack shouted, throwing her hat to the floor. “She ain’t stoppin’ their Sun and Moon from fightin’, an’ she ain’t even gonna give Twi a way back either?”

Sunburst loudly sniffled again and shrunk in on himself. “I…I thought that that adventure might’ve helped her consider others…” he muttered.

Celestia was frowning, though not in distress. Rather, Discord knew that frown rather well on Sunbutt’s face. She was thinking. “Maybe…maybe she has,” she said.

“With all due respect, Your Majesty,” Rarity piped up, “what?”

“She asked for a way back to Equestria,” Celestia pointed out. “Not for her to be instantly transported here.”

“Aye,” Luna agreed, “but We have dealt with so-called wish-granters before. They are ones to take a request and twist it in the most vile of ways. It remains to be seen if this Galactic Nova will do the same.”

“Well, it doesn’t look like a djinn,” Discord commented. “But I have to say, it’s taking a long time to process Miss Shimmer’s wish.”

“What do you mean?” Rainbow asked.

Discord shrugged and leaned back in the couch. “Well, it’s a pretty simple request. You’d think that it could solve it,” he snapped his talon, “like that!”

Starlight frowned. “Didn’t you say that universe was on lockdown, though?” she asked.

Discord waved his paw in a so-so manner. “That multiverse is, but yes. Nothing has been allowed in or out in around two thousand years.”

Nova, really, was built do do one thing, and one thing quite well.

Wish.h

ifndef _Wish_h_

define _Wish_h_

include

…

include “Travel.h”

class Wish {
public:

bool execute();
friend std::istream& operator >>(std::istream&, Wish&);

private:

…
std::string action_;
Travel transport_;
…

};

endif

Wish.cpp

include “Wish.h”

using namespace std;

bool Wish::execute() {

if (action_ == “travel”) {

if (!transport_.check()) {

cout << “LOCATION: ” << transport_.destination() << “ NOT FOUND.”;
cout << ‘\n’;
return false;

}
…

}

istream& operator >> (istream& in, Wish& w) {

…

}

Travel.h

ifndef _Travel_h_

define _Travel_h_

include

…

class Travel {
public:

bool check();
…
const std::string& destination() const {return destination_;}
friend std::istream& operator >>(std::istream&, Travel&);
…

private:

…
std::string destination_;
…

};

…

endif

Travel.cpp

include “Travel.h”

using namespace std;

bool Travel::check() {

ifstream in(“locations.txt”);
list locations;
string temp;
while (!in.eof()) {

getline(in, temp);
locations.push_back(temp);
in.ignore();

}
in.close();
for (const string& s : locations) if (s == destination_) return true;
return false;

}

…

istream& operator >>(istream& in, Travel& t) {

…

}

…

main.cpp

include

include “Wish.h”

using namespace std;

int main() {

Wish w;
bool err = true;
while (err) {

cout << “READY.” << ‘\n’;
cout << “I WILL GRANT ONE WISH.” << ‘\n’;
cin >> w;
if (!w.execute()) cout << “WISH INVALID.” << ‘\n’;
else {

cout << “OK.” << ‘\n’;
cout << “3, 2, 1, GO.” << ‘\n’;
err = false;

}

}
return 0;

}

“LOCATION: EQUESTRIA NOT FOUND. \n” Galactic Nova rumbled, and Sunset’s heart fell. “WISH INVALID. \n”

“W-what?” Sunset stammered. “Not FOUND?”

“READY. \n” Nova repeated, the invalid wish seeming to trigger a reset. “I WILL GRANT ONE WISH. \n”

Marx’s loud cackling behind her did absolutely nothing to help Sunset’s mood. “Wow!” he said between laughs, having caught back up. “You know, I thought you were gonna betray me, but damn this result is a lot funnier than my initial plan!”

Sunset whirled around, her face contorted nearly into a snarl. “Oh, so me not being able to get home is funny to you?”

Marx’s laughs quieted down to a dark chuckle as he shook his head, his metallic wings glinting. “Trust me, it’s hilarious!”

“Fine, then,” Sunset spat. “Make your damn wish. I should’ve known this universe would find a way to screw me out of an easy way home. Go ahead, stop the Sun and Moon from fighting.”

Marx broke out into another laugh. “Jeez, you really do just have a one-track mind on this, huh? I kinda thought you’d’ve figured it out by now!”

Sunset’s ears fell back a bit. “What?”

The jester used one of his wings to wipe a tear from his eye. “Who do you think got those two riled up in the first place?”

Sunset sat in stunned silence for a few moments as her brain finally caught up to what was going on. Marx had betrayed her, just as she had betrayed him. A part of her felt almost offended that she’d fallen for it, that she’d even bothered to trust him in the first place, but the end result was still the same.

Before she could get a word in to try anything to derail the situation, Marx turned his gaze back to Nova and declared his wish.

“I wish for the power to rule Popstar!”

Nova spent far less time processing his wish, its eyes only lighting up for the barest fraction of a second. “OK. \n” the planet-sized machine complied. “3, 2, 1, GO. \n”

“WHAT?” Shouted just about everypony in Discord’s living room. Applejack even reached down, picked up her hat off the floor, and threw it down again for extra emphasis.

“So they’re both dirty liars!” she exclaimed.

Fluttershy gasped and ducked back down behind the couch as bright streams of light began flowing from Nova to Marx. The jester cackled wildly as he absorbed the energy and his body began to change. His pink skin noticeably brightened, and the golden frames of his wings shone with new polish. The wings’ hexagonally-tiled membrane separated, Marx’s new magic allowing the hexagons to freely flow over each other. His claws sharpened, and even his hat became longer, the pom-poms at the end fraying.

Personally, Rarity thought he did that last one on purpose as a crime against fashion.

Celestia had sat straight up in her seat, her eyes going wide. Luna looked contemplative, though had a very distinct concerned frown on her face as well.

Sunburst, meanwhile, looked to be all but panicking. “C’mon, Sunset…” he frantically whispered to himself. “You’ve got this…”

Sunset stared, dumbstruck, as Marx’s laughter crescendoed. “You-” he cut himself off with another cackle, “you should see the look on your face!”

That, at least, spurred Sunset enough to get her wits about her. Snarling, she flared her horn. “You son of a bitch!”

An aquamarine beam of light, far more powerful than Sunset had managed to casually summon before, speared out from her horn and slammed directly into Marx’s face. He vanished within it, and for a moment Sunset was hopeful that she had managed to stop his wish when she saw the streams of light from Nova stop.

Then her left ear twitched, and with a short sound not unlike television static, Marx reappeared to her left. The streams of light–which Sunset suspected were Nova transferring power to Marx–resumed flowing into him. He was no longer cackling, at least, but Sunset was quite sure that his expression now was actually worse.

He was breathing deeply, just as surprised as Sunset that he was basically unscathed–and had teleported successfully, for that matter. What little damage her attack had done to him was healing, as well, the small amount of seared flesh having already reconstructed itself. Slowly, his grin spread beyond its previous bounds, crossing not only his face but wrapping around a bit into what were previously his cheeks as well. “This...this is so much power,” he said, barely above a whisper. His eyes focused themselves on Sunset, who had willed Warp Star to back up and face him. For the absolute briefest of moments, Marx looked almost regretful, but his grin sprang back to its full glory rather quickly. “Enough to tie up some loose ends.”

His eyes bulged massively, and Sunset had to fight down the urge to vomit looking at them nearly pop out of his head. She barely had enough time to duck as they suddenly tiled, gaining the look of an insect’s compound eyes, and purple lasers shot out in all directions. Multiple hit her Warp Star, but dealt minimal damage and just knocked her back a few hundred meters.

Spiraling end-over-end, the unicorn fought for control over her ride as the spiral galaxy flashed in and out of her vision. After a disorienting few seconds, she managed to stop its spinning and was once again facing Marx and Nova. The former heaved a great flap of his wings and rocketed forwards at her, but she was already ready with another spell, this one focusing on finely-tuned telekinetic control to at least slow him down.

Then he vanished again, and Sunset’s eyes widened as she heard the tell-tale sound of his teleportation.

Directly behind her.

Abandoning her planning and acting on instinct, Sunset willed the Warp Star to dive. It rocketed downwards at a breakneck pace in the nick of time, a storm of what looked like arrows flying through her position from just moments before. Granted a very slight moment of reprieve as Marx reoriented himself, Sunset looked forward and constructed another plan as her eyes narrowed in on Popstar. Marx wanted her dead dead, and she couldn’t meaningfully damage him. She needed help, as much as she hated to admit it, and both Twilight and Kirby were powerful enough to lend a hoof.

She hoped.

Plan in place, she started forward, accelerating up to multiple kilometers per second. “Hey!” she heard Marx shout behind her, the sound somehow reaching her despite her speed. Another sound of teleportation, and he was directly in front of her. “We aren’t done here!”

They were, at this point, underneath Nova, Sunset having to swerve under it to get to Popstar. She already had her horn lit and a spell prepared, though, and another beam of magic connected with him before he could try anything else.

She ignored his retaliatory strike–a series of what looked like cutter blades–and sped past, clearing Nova entirely and beginning the long trek towards Popstar. She was still well over a hundred thousand kilometers out, but at the rate she was moving she would reach it in only a few minutes. Sparing a glance back, her jaw dropped.

Marx was charging after her still, as she expected, but Nova was clearly still supplying him power. The streams of energy were just as bright as before, and they seemed to stretch as Marx got further and further away from Nova. Until at some point, they reached a critical length, and Sunset hoped that would somehow sever the connection between them.

It did not.

Instead, the streams brightened further, more and more power flowing into Marx, and Nova began to move. The planet-sized construct was following behind Marx, and Sunset desperately hoped that that didn’t mean that Marx was dragging it, somehow.

Because even with all of that, they were gaining on her.

She couldn’t quite see Marx’s facial features from this distance, but he did something to summon a great beam of light, and Sunset realized that he was firing a laser at her just in time to dodge. She yanked the Warp Star up, but even with its protections she could feel the heat of the laser as it passed under her.

That itself raised several questions–in a true vacuum, she should not have been able to feel the heat of it, since it didn’t pass through where she had thought the Warp Star’s air bubble was. She’d been refraining from using her fire because of it; she had thought that it would exhaust the oxygen in her bubble before the Warp Star could replenish it. But if that wasn’t the case…

Flaring her horn, she shot several fireballs backwards and left a Naught Bell’s Explosion in her wake for Marx to run into. Just as she expected, a few seconds later a deafening boom rang out as he slammed right into her mine.

Sunset looked backwards, at least expecting Marx to have been forced to slow down, but instead her eyes widened as she realized that he was, in fact, closer than he had been before. The explosion had done little to stop him, only slightly damaging his right wing, which was correcting itself before her very eyes. He was close enough now that she could make out his expressions, and Sunset had a horrifying realization: all that had done was piss him off.

Well, at least the Sun and Moon had stopped fighting, distracted by the commotion above them.

Still, this was definitely not going to work. Popstar was still at least thirty thousand kilometers away, and Marx was growing more powerful with every passing second. She needed a new plan, and fast. Somewhat subconsciously, her eyes traveled up the streams of energy towards Nova when something clicked for her. That hole in Nova’s forehead was displaying quite a bit of its insides. It was a split-second decision, but with any luck, she would be able to cut off Marx's power at its source and at least give Kirby and Twilight some kind of a chance to beat him.

Even if she couldn't.

Before she could manage to turn around, though, Marx visibly snarled. With that same almost staticy sound, he warped again, this time in front of her. “That’s torn it!” he shouted, a white line suddenly splitting his form vertically. To Sunset’s growing horror, he physically split himself in two–his grin never wavering–and between his two halves was a small, perfectly black sphere that warped the light of the galaxy behind it.

In a panic, Sunset forced the Warp Star up a smidge, just barely avoiding the event horizon of the miniature black hole. The spacetime around it was still so incredibly warped that she swung entirely around the black hole and wound up back where she started, albeit upside-down, while moving in an entirely straight line from her perspective.

The extreme gravitational presence ceased quickly enough, thankfully, and Sunset spun the Warp Star to be facing Marx again as she slowly (relatively, at least) began backing towards Nova. “What the fuck was that?” she shouted at him as soon as he put himself back together.

Marx looked just as surprised with himself, but that surprise very quickly faded into glee. “I don’t know!” he enthused. “But it was awesome! So much power right at my wingtips!”

Careful to make sure that Marx was looking at himself and not at her, Sunset glanced back to gauge how much further she had to Nova. The gigantic structure had still been moving towards them, at least, so there was only a few hundred kilometers separating her from the hole above its eye at this point. She just had to stall for a little while longer to keep Marx from stopping her.

“Is that all you’re after?” Sunset shouted. “Power? That’s it?”

“Of course! When I rule Popstar, I can do whatever I want!” Marx declared. “Now wouldn’t that be the greatest prank ever pulled!”

Only around a hundred kilometers now. Sunset could even feel the gravitational effects of Nova’s own mass at this distance.

“Is that all this is to you?” Sunset countered. “A prank?”

Marx cackled. “Oh, this isn’t just a prank! This is the prank! The prank to end all pranks! The prank to spit in the face of everyone who sneered at the Noddy that dared take off his sleeping cap and put on a jester’s one! To show up anyone who declared that the ancient lore wasn’t worth a damn! To…where did you go?”

Marx’s eyes tracked upward as Nova approached, settling on the aquamarine and orange glow retreating into the device itself. He frowned and one of his eyelids twitched. “That bitch! Couldn’t even stick around for the monologue!”

Far faster than Sunset had traveled, he shot after her.

Nova’s interior was made of silvery and purplish metals–Sunset suspected some combination of steel and mithril. Based on how just being here felt like it was warping and constricting her magic, she suspected the latter, at least, was correct.

Unfortunately, the structure seemed to have some sort of self-defense system. She was still moving at dozens of kilometers a second, but the windy pathways through Nova and the turrets of some sort detaching from the walls had slowed her down from the hundreds a second she had been aiming for.

Somewhat absently, she pondered what this was even used for. The tube she was in was well over a kilometer wide and roughly cylindrical, so the best she could come up with was the idea that it was some sort of giant coolant system. Regardless, she had an issue to focus on, and yelped as the turrets fired.

She ducked down below the lip of the Warp Star, and on accident touched her lit horn to its surface. Instead of just banging it there and netting herself a hornache for her troubles, the Warp Star suddenly fired a spread of star-shaped projectiles from its gun-like end. Some impacted the floating ones and downed them instantly, and their explosions lingered in the air a bit as Sunset sped past.

She blinked in surprise. Not only was that quite a bit more powerful than what she could manage on her own, but that had spent very little of her magic.

Hurriedly, she repeated the process to take down the rest of the turrets in her way. They were ramping up in intensity, but it took so little magic for her to fire at them she was able to clear out everything in front of her with very little difficulty.

Soon enough, she breached out of the pathway she was in and reached a giant, cylindrical room roughly at Nova’s center. It had to be at least a dozen–if not two dozen–kilometers across and a few kilometers tall, and some sort of electrical force field surrounded its exact center. The cylinder of electricity was a couple kilometers in diameter itself, and eight great columns, from which the current sprang, stretched from floor to ceiling. They were visibly lit up with magic, guarding Nova’s very center.

Floating within the electric cage, seemingly in defiance of any sense of gravity, was a pink object shaped like a Valentine’s heart. It spun lazily in place, pulsating every so often as white streams of energy streaked off of it and into the walls of the room, presumably offering Marx its power.

Frowning, Sunset targeted the nearest column to her and fired. Her Warp Star projectiles just pinged off of the–likely mithril–column with little to no effect. Clearly, she needed a different strategy.

Unfortunately, as if detecting that it was under attack, the entire set of pillars began spinning. Sunset willed the Warp Star to match their speed, but they simply responded with a number of turrets detaching from them and beginning to fire at her.

Shit! Sunset mentally cursed, dodging a shot and shooting back. The turrets went down easily enough, but more just kept coming almost as fast as she could shoot them down. She needed some way to take out the turrets and focus her own magic on the pillars simultaneously.

She suddenly grinned as a thought crossed her mind. She could lend her own power to the Warp Star for it to use more efficiently, but only for certain things. But if she could draw that power back out, maybe she could use it for her own spells! Tentatively, she pressed down on the Warp Star with her hoof and willed the magic into her.

Instantly, her horn’s corona flared to multiple times its original size as more magic than she could use at once flooded her system. She was certain that she was screaming–the pain was far greater than anything she had felt before in her entire life–but she couldn’t hear it over the sound of the blood rushing in her ears and her own magic’s deafening twinkling. She could even feel her cutie mark glowing as well, her native talent for these magicks pitching in for this feat.

The turrets nearest to her all immediately exploded, unable to withstand the heat that she was putting out. The closest pillar began to glow red hot as, gradually, her scream of pain morphed into a roar of determination. The exterior of the column began to melt until, finally, something broke inside of it and it exploded, sending molten mithril everywhere. Absently, Sunset used some of the absurd amount of magical energy running through her to put up a shield and defend herself from the metal, but the majority of her mind (at least, the part of it that wasn’t dedicated to fighting to retain consciousness) was focused on attacking the pillars.

At some point, the pillars began rotating in reverse. Sunset hardly noticed. The aquamarine color of the Warp Star began to drain at its edges as she pulled more and more power from it. Sunset hardly noticed. One by one, the pillars of Nova’s defense system fell. Sunset hardly noticed.

All she really was even able to notice was the magic running through her system. It was drawn up from the Warp Star, through her hooves, and rushed through the rest of her body until it concentrated in her horn. Unicorns were never supposed to use this much magic at once, and doing so was so incredibly dangerous. It happened, every so often, that a unicorn driven to intense stress, moreso than could be achieved even by human torture methods Sunset had heard of, might have a magical flare like this. That, however, would usually kill themself and everypony around them, as magical flares of this size usually left the caster dead. As it was, Sunset suspected that the only thing keeping her body from ripping itself apart at a cellular level was the Warp Star’s own protective magicks, but the part of her brain that thought that was very quickly brought into the rest of the fold of registering the pain.

But as soon as Sunset’s visual cortex could register that the final pillar had exploded, she forced the drain closed and stopped casting. Slamming her hoof down on the Warp Star, there was one final spike of pain as the excess magic rushed back into it and restored its coloration. She panted, her throat sore from the screaming and the rest of her sore from the magic, but she smiled all the same. The electrical shield was down and Nova’s core was exposed.

She still had to move quickly, though. She wasn’t sure how much time she ha-

“SUNSET SHIMMER!” Marx bellowed, rushing out of the corridor she had come through.

“OH FUCK!” Sunset shouted back as well as she could with how sore her throat was. She was still just as quick to react, at least, and managed to dodge the laser that Marx fired and willed the Warp Star to get as far away from Marx as she could.

Neither of them noticed the missed laser ricochet off of Nova’s heart and hit the ceiling, leaving behind the faintest of cracks in the heart’s surface.

Marx rushed after Sunset far faster than she could move her Warp Star in the limited space. He bore down on her extremely quickly, his sharpened claws glistening in the faint light that the heart provided. Sunset, looking back, cringed, prepared a shield that she hoped would at least slow him down, and closed her eyes to accept the inevitable.

Marx’s strike, though, never came, as instead Nova–and everything in it–suddenly lurched to the side.

Nova, and thus both Sunset and Marx, had been traveling towards Popstar at close to a hundred kilometers every second. Whatever had just stopped it also stopped everything inside of it in its tracks, except for three things: Sunset, the Warp Star she was on, and Marx.

Inertia dictated that, even as Nova itself stopped, they continued moving. Inside the core, this translated to suddenly being thrown at the wall at multiple times the Earth’s escape velocity. The only saving grace was the sheer size of the room, giving Sunset about a quarter of a second to realize what was happening before she would be vaporized on impact. Using just about all of her willpower, she directed the Warp Star to slow the fuck down, which bought her just enough time to organize an emergency teleport outside of Nova itself.

Vaguely, she thought she heard Marx crash into something and heard glass shatter, but she didn’t have time to think about that at the moment. That had to have busted up Nova’s core something fierce, and if this universe had taught her anything, it was to expect the most dramatic conclusions.

She reappeared fairly close to Nova's face, took stock of the situation, and began to flee as quickly as she could. “GET OUT OF HERE!” she shouted at the Sun and Moon in the process, who seemed to have had stopped their feud to halt Nova’s advance. Her voice was still a little hoarse, but the shouting was necessary, so by Celestia’s sunny flank she was going to shout. “IT’S GONNA BLOW!”

Marx was having a much worse time. When Nova had suddenly stopped, he was launched directly into its core at about a hundred kilometers per second. It wasn’t enough to kill him–with how much power Nova had granted him, he figured that he was indestructible at this point–but it was enough to hurt.

Worse yet, him slamming into the heart had shattered it, releasing a sticky pink goop that clung to every part of him it encountered. The heart had very quickly reformed with him stuck to it, as well, and no matter how hard he struggled, he couldn’t get out.

His cutter blades did nothing, his laser beams were entirely ineffective, the heart was preventing him from forming a black hole, and it was even stopping him from teleporting! It shifted and rippled every time he struggled, but no matter what it unerringly returned to its original shape!

Somewhere in the distance, but still within Nova itself, something crashed, and Marx’s eyes widened. It had sustained too much damage.

“Help!” he shouted. “S-sunset? Anyone? Please!”

Another crash, and he even whimpered as the realization of his doom washed over him.

“I don’t want to die,” he whispered to himself. “GET ME OUT OF HERE!”

When the Galactic Nova had originally been sealed, its creators redesigned it to only grant a single wish, as to prevent any malicious actors that managed to unseal it from taking over the universe in one fell swoop. But damage to its core had also damaged some of its systems, and it happened to skip over its check that a user hadn’t already used a wish when Marx shouted.

And so, just moments before its own destruction, the Heart of Nova granted one, final wish, and Marx’s world went white.

“OK. \n”
“3, 2, 1, GO. \n”

Marx groaned as he opened his eyes, and immediately closed them again as light shone in them.

“Jah!” a voice called. “Ju mesti veja! Bonjam!”

Marx groaned again and forced his eyes open, regardless of the light. “What the hell?”

Slowly, the indistinct lights resolved themselves into a single campfire, and Marx realized that he was in a cave of some sort. The figure that had been speaking to him, which had detached, gloved hands, was floating around a quarter of a meter off the floor next to it. It was dressed in a blue robe, a scarf covering much of its face aside from its bright yellow eyes surrounded by brown skin.

The figure blinked, and seemed to be considering something for a moment. “Joh! You speak Somnic!” The figure’s eyes turned up a bit, and Marx got the impression that it (he?) was smiling. “Sorry if I have rust; it has been long time since I learned your language.” The figure held out a hand, and Marx cautiously took it in his wing to get helped to his feet. “I is Magolor. What is your name?”

Author's Note

My apologies for the delay on this chapter! I had a camping trip two weekends ago, and lab work this summer has distracted me from being able to write a lot. Hopefully, though, this final battle of Milky Way Wishes lives up to its buildup! It's quite a bit different from the one in canon, but, well, the circumstances are themselves quite different. Sunset, even with the extra power of the Summoning Stars, is just straight-up not capable of taking out Marx hopped up on Nova's power. And if Marx wasn't so new to his powers and actually knew everything he was capable of, Sunset would've been dead within the first seconds of the fight. Tricking him into essentially defeating himself by trapping him in Nova when it exploded was just about her only option.

For a quick note on the semi-pseudocode from Nova's perspective, the Ancients coded in C++ in this fic because that's the only programing language I happen to know.

We'll also get into the ramifications of Sunset's little stunt in Nova's core in the epilogue chapter of MWW. Even with the Warp Star stopping her from outright killing herself, channeling that much magic is really just not good for a unicorn. So stay tuned for chapter twenty-four: What Wishes Wrought.

Oh, and on a final note, Marx and Magolor had to meet somehow, now didn't they.

Chapter XXIV: What Wishes Wrought

Twilight was having an extremely confusing, generally horrifying, and all around distressing day. Waking up to celestial bodies fighting had been horrible enough as it was. Finding out that Meta Knight also had no idea what was going on had just been devastating. The Meta-Knights were just as confused as her, though they seemed to have handled the situation quite a bit more calmly.

Twilight had flown into a panic at that, the stress of the Sun and Moon actively fighting each other getting to her. Beyond the actuality of the situation, it brought up some unpleasant memories regarding her direct encounter with Nightmare Moon–and the lingering fear that Princess Luna might relapse. It was irrational, she knew. Whatever corrupting force had gotten its claws into Luna a millennium before had been purified by the Elements. And after the Princess of the Night had celebrated Nightmare Night in Ponyville with them, it had faded to near nothingness. But her nightmare from two nights earlier still weighed heavily on Twilight’s mind, her lack of confidence in herself sapping her mental stamina.

Meta Knight not being a fount of potential exposition for once was just the straw that broke the alicorn’s back.

It had taken upwards of six hours for her to calm down enough to even sit still. The first couple of hours had mostly been her letting out incoherent blubbering through half-choked sobs, her brain still trying to find some sort of hoofhold of a plan even as the absurdity of the situation caught up to her all at once. Meta Knight, for his part, didn’t say a word throughout the entire process.

It was rather refreshing, if Twilight was being honest. She loved her friends to bits, truly, but all of them except Fluttershy could be overbearing at times. Whenever she got like this, it paid for her to just have someone nearby to just…listen, even if her speech was nearly incomprehensible. She hadn’t had a panic attack this bad in years, but back home Shiny or Cadance would usually fill that role. And as much as she loved her little brother, Spike’s brand of sarcasm was not conducive to helping her through a severe panic, if the Want-it-Need-it incident was anything to go by.

As it was, Meta Knight’s quiet presence was simply appreciated. After her panic-fueled crying started to exhaust her and her blubbering got a bit more comprehensible, he got up to fetch them some tea. That wound up helping immensely, though over the next few hours she paced enough to wear a hole in the carpet of the Meta-Knight’s meeting room.

She might’ve been subconsciously summoning earth pony magic during that, but she digressed. They had at least used those hours to come up with a plan.

After the tea break and Twilight taking a few deep breaths, Sailor Dee had entered the room with some actual information. She didn’t know exactly why the Sun and Moon–Solaria and Luanris, as they were apparently called–were fighting. The two were generally cordial towards each other, even after their divorce (now wasn’t that a thought), if only for the sake of their sons. Whatever had them so worked up to attack each other must have been big.

As it stood, none of them had an easy way to get up there and ask them what was going on. Meta Knight had groused that it would have been easy with the Halberd, to which Twilight had paused just long enough in her pacing to shoot him an icy glare. The plan they eventually did come up with was simple: Twilight and Meta Knight would fly back to Castle Dedede, check in with them, and ask Kirby to solve the problem for them if he wasn’t planning to already.

Twilight really wasn’t a fan of the fact that this was all out of her hooves, but it wasn’t exactly like she could fly to space.

Unfortunately for them, the plan fell apart pretty much as soon as they got back to the castle…almost eight hours after Twilight had initially left. A chunk of it was still missing from the side, Twilight noticed as they approached, and cringed a bit at the fact that she had caused that. Vul’s crew was making good progress though, even with the time of day changing on a whim, and it looked like the man himself, who had overnighted at Castle Dedede to oversee the construction efforts, had seen their approach. He didn’t move to greet them–Twilight assumed it was because he had to keep watch on the construction–but he said something to King Dedede, and the penguin and Bandana Dee exited the main doors and waved up to the two of them.

Who exactly was there was what wrecked the plan, though. Or rather, who wasn’t.

“Sunset is missing?” Twilight exclaimed incredulously after a bit of conversation.

Dedede shrugged. “We couldn’t find her this morning.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow as night abruptly turned to day. “And where is Spike?”

“Oh, I sent your lil’ dragon friend off to see if Kirby could fix this!”

Twilight sighed and would have pinched the bridge of her nose had she the fingers to do it. “Well, at least that was pretty much what we planned to do, but now I have to go and pick Spike up, too. Where does Kirby live?”

Meta Knight pointed down the mountain with his sword, a different one than what he was holding on the Halberd, Twilight noted, but nothing particularly ornate. “Kirby’s house is a few kilometers down the path from the foot of the mountain, on the edge of a small village.”

“Thanks.”

Twilight spread her wings and was about to take off when Lunaris once again booted Solaria from the sky, and Bandee gasped and dropped his staff. His gaze was turned skyward, and everyone else soon turned to look at whatever he was looking at. Twilight’s own jaw dropped as she looked up, as well.

With the Sun no longer in the sky to scatter light, the area directly beyond the atmosphere was plainly visible. Occupying a massive proportion of the sky was a giant, yellow, circular object with a catlike face and a myriad of objects sticking out around it. Twilight couldn’t quite tell the scale of the object with nothing to compare it against, but she guessed that it had to be at least as large as Equus’s own moon.

Even Lunaris, who had seemed ready to launch over the horizon to show Solaria what for just moments before, paused to stare up at it.

A whispered “No” from Meta Knight redirected everyone’s attention to him. His eyes had shrunk to pinpricks behind his mask and Twilight suspected that he had paled behind it as well. Assuming he was capable of it; she didn’t exactly know his physiology.

Really, him being shaken was itself more terrifying than whatever it was that had appeared in the sky. He had always presented himself as unflappable, even in the dire circumstances of his battleship going down, so this was just insane to Twilight. “What,” she gulped, “is that?”

“A Clockwork Star,” Meta Knight replied, his voice barely louder than a whisper. Despite that, Twilight could hear the capitalization. “I didn’t realize they actually existed.”

Twilight narrowed her eyes at the sky. “Is it…getting closer?”

Indeed, the object had appeared to grow in size as it approached, and Twilight revised her earlier estimate. It was at least twice as large as Equus’s moon.

Dedede’s own jaw had dropped at this point. “We’re doomed.”

Thankfully, Solaria came back up over the horizon a few moments later. The sky turned blue again, but while the image of the great clockwork star faded, it was still visible in the daylit sky. She seemed somewhat disinterested in resuming her feud with Lunaris, at least, and the two came to some sort of agreement before both rushing at the giant object. They were clearly straining themselves, something that Twilight hadn't even thought was possible of celestial objects, but they managed to stop it in its tracks.

A few seconds later, they abruptly flew away in different directions, and it exploded.

A moon-sized object disintegrating like that was a spectacular thing to watch. Its eyes went wide and it seemed to open its mouth in some sort of silent scream just before it happened, but whatever had done it in had done it in hard. There was enough oxygen inside of it to sustain a giant fireball, pushing it apart at the seams. Parts of its face and interior slammed forward, but their pieces seemed small enough that they all burned up in Popstar’s atmosphere. The objects strewn at its sides went every which way, and two of the piano keys actually hit the ring system.

They bounced off.

Twilight didn’t want to think about the physics of that.

Slowly, Meta Knight lowered his sword and slightly relaxed. “That was…strange,” he noted. “I was unaware that the Clockwork Stars were anything more than myth. To see one destroyed like that…”

“What in the world is a Clockwork Star?” Dedede asked.

“Ancient, wish-granting machines from a bygone era,” Meta Knight explained. “My people have legends about them, but they’re all children’s stories. Fables about how you shouldn’t skip out on hard work, and stories warning against megalomania.” He took a deep breath. “I had thought them nothing more than that, but clearly I need to take a better look at the stories from my youth.”

“Did the stories depict them as…sapient?” Twilight asked, concerned.

Meta Knight shook his head. Given that he was mostly head, it was a fairly impressive feat. “No. They almost invariably depicted them as dumb machines, beholden entirely to their user’s wish. They didn’t even twist the wishes; the fables are all about how one can have everything and still be unsatisfied.”

Twilight sighed in relief.

Meta Knight chuckled at that. “I take it you are still uncomfortable with the idea of another sapient dying?”

Twilight frowned. “It’s…not quite that. I’ve attended three of my grandparents’ funerals and my brother was in the military. Even though Equestria hasn’t seen warfare in centuries, he did get called out sometimes to deal with monster attacks. And I had to take an ethics course at CSGU and spent ages debating about the Landslide Problem-”

“Landslide Problem?” Bandee asked.

“Five ponies are directly in the path of a landslide and will die if you do nothing. All you can do is put up a magical shield, but that will redirect the landslide and kill another pony who would not have died otherwise. Is it ethical to do so?”

“Oh, we have something similar,” Bandana Dee stated. “But it’s about Burning Leos, an overflowing pipe, and a valve.”

“Anyway,” Twilight redirected, “what I was leading up to was that I know, from a utilitarian standpoint, killing one sapient being to directly save others isn’t exactly unethical. And if that Clockwork Star had collided with Popstar, we all definitely would’ve died. But I think it’s the last option that should be considered viable, and was just uncomfortable with it being taken hastily if it could’ve been talked down.”

Everyone was silent for a few moments.

“Well, that got real heavy real quick,” Dedede spoke up. Turning to Meta Knight, he changed the subject. “So, do we gotta worry about anything falling to the ground?”

Meta Knight looked back at the sky. “That seems unlikely. There’ll be a meteor shower in the coming days, but I don’t think any of the debris is large enough to actually hit the ground.”

Bandee’s eyes narrowed. “So uh, what is that falling right towards us, then?”

Meta Knight’s eyes went wide in surprise as he also saw the piece of debris coming right for them. “Oh shit! Scatter!”

The four of them did so immediately, diving out of the way as an aquamarine object fell from the sky at mach speed. It shattered into eight star-shaped objects upon hitting the ground, each of a different color. They all shot off, seven of them shooting up into the sky and the yellow one moving north faster than a bullet.

The main thing of interest, Twilight noted as she poked her head out of the bush she dove into, was the ball of shields that had been riding on top of the object, just as aquamarine as the falling object itself. It unceremoniously bounced across the ground as its ride disintegrated before slamming into Castle Dedede’s walls. The shields dissolved, revealing a disoriented, panting, and extremely tired Sunset Shimmer.

As Sunset stumbled a bit and she regained her hoofing, Twilight took a good look at her. She had definitely seen better days. There were massive bags under her eyes, what looked like a bit of blood matted into the fur of one of her legs, and from what Twilight could see it looked like she was missing a tooth. Her mane and tail were also outright smoldering, and her horn’s keratin and the fur on her forehead around it looked almost charred.

Slowly, Sunset looked back at the building she had slammed into. “Huh,” she said, “that’s neat.”

Then she collapsed like a sack of bricks.

Discord yawned, stood up from his couch, and stretched himself, popping far more joints than he actually had in the process. “Well then,” he said, conjuring a remote and turning off the screen, “that all seems well taken care of.”

Nopony said anything for a few seconds, all of them rather dumbfounded by the events within Nova. “Did…did Sunset just…” Sunburst started.

“Break a machine the size of a small planet?” Starlight finished for him. “Yes. Remind me to never piss her off when they get back.”

“When?” Discord pointed out. “I admire your optimism.”

Starlight didn’t say anything in response, but instead gestured vaguely at the screen before miming an explosion.

Discord stroked his beard. “Well, I suppose I wouldn’t put it past them to give Void a metaphorical kick in the pants.” He shrugged. “Eh, I suppose we’ll see how that goes. Now then, I do believe that it is…” he snapped his tail and summoned a miniature sundial, which cast a shadow entirely unrelated to the room’s lighting, “close to eight in the morning.”

Rainbow gave off an exaggerated yawn and flopped back in her seat. “Ugh,” she groaned, “I’ve been up for almost a whole day. And I have work today!”

Rarity chuckled lightly. “Darling, we saved the world last night–again. I daresay that we deserve to take a day off.”

“Are you kidding?” Rainbow retorted. “Who knows what Discord’s plants did to Ponyville’s clouds? Mayor Mare’ll have my tail if I slack on weather management now of all times.”

Applejack nodded. “And Ah’ll be helpin’ with the cleanup on the ground, Ah’m sure.”

Pinkie looked at her, a bit confused. “Don’t you get up before the Sun does, AJ?”

“Eeyup.”

The baker did some mental math. “So you’ve been up for…twenty-six hours? And are staying up longer?”

Applejack laughed. “Please, a day awake ain’t nothin’! Y’know, back durin’ applebuck season, it took at least three afore Ah started hallucinatin’ all that bad!”

“That is not strictly encouraging,” Rarity deadpanned.

“So, um,” Fluttershy broached to switch the topic, “Discord? How will we know if Twilight or Sunset or Spike gets into trouble again?”

Discord frowned in thought. “You know, I hadn’t quite thought of that.” Somewhat excitedly, he snapped his paw. The screen flickered back on, focusing on Twilight as she and Meta Knight carried Sunset to Castle Dedede’s infirmary. At the same time, one of his cupboards flew open and began emitting light. “And that cupboard now leads back to Fluttershy’s house! I’ll let you know if I see anything interesting happening in Dreamland.” He blinked and snapped again. “Oh, and the Cutie Mark Crusaders are back at their houses.

“Well ain’t that nice!” Applejack said, smiling a bit.

The Ponyville residents began to depart, Fluttershy giving Discord a quick hug as she passed. Once they had left, he turned to the four remaining ponies.

“If I may request, Discord,” Luna asked, some amount of distrust still coloring her voice, “could you bring the rest of us back to Canterlot directly? I feel that it is best if my sister and I get there as quickly as possible.”

Sunburst frowned. “But, why me and Starli…oh.”

Starlight cringed. “Yeah, I’m going to prison, aren’t I?”

“That remains to be seen,” Celestia softly reminded them, before Discord snapped his tail.

Sunburst and Starlight got it easy, appearing upright and on the floor in the middle of Canterlot Palace’s throne room. Much to the bafflement of the guards, Celestia flashed in upside-down a bit in the air and Luna appeared near the ceiling, mercifully high enough to catch herself in a glide. Her sister was hardly as lucky, landing in a rather undignified heap onto her throne.

And on top of her nephew, who had been sitting in it at the time.

It was a very confusing few minutes for everypony involved.

“I just…feel underappreciated sometimes, you know?” Spike said.

He and Kirby were sitting at the shore of a large lake, which sprawled out from behind Kirby’s house. Kirby himself was fishing, even as the sky overhead was in chaos. He had managed to sleep through most of Solaria and Lunaris’s fight, deciding to nap the day away with how tiring his battles to reconstitute the Star Rod (and against Nightmare) had been. Spike had even been the one to wake him up, but instead of heading up there on a Warp Star to remedy the situation, Kirby had noticed how down Spike looked and opted to console him for a bit.

Besides, Kirby was pretty sure that this was just Lunaris being angry after he blew a chunk of him up. And Popstar seemed more than resilient enough to take it, so cheering up Spike took priority.

And also enough focus that neither of them noticed the giant yellow object in the sky until it exploded, at which point Kirby noticed Solaria and Lunaris start getting along again and promptly shrugged the entire situation off.

Responding to Spike’s earlier question, Kirby tilted his head a bit and gave a “How do you mean?” expression.

Spike sighed. “It’s just…I’m stuck as a messenger. I got Dedede when you guys took down the Halberd, I came here to get you to stop the Sun and Moon from fighting, hay, I was a glorified mailbox for Twilight and Princess Celestia back in Equestria.” He scuffed the ground around a bit from where he was seated. “I…I want to help Twilight, I want to get involved, but everytime I try to help I just screw things up.”

Kirby blinked confusedly and gestured to himself.

Spike scoffed. “Yeah, and fat load of good I did there. I just got myself eaten.”

Kirby emphatically shook his head. Making sure that he had Spike’s attention, he set up his fishing rod to stay upright without his help and began miming breathing fire and punching things.

The corners of Spike’s mouth turned up and he snorted, a bit of smoke leaking from his nostrils in amusement. “You don’t talk a lot, do you?”

Kirby grinned and spoke the first word he’d said all day: “Nope!”

Spike chuckled. “Thanks for listening, anyway.” He looked out over the water. “I just hope Twilight lets me help out more directly, soon. I’m a dragon!”

The pair lapsed into silence for a while as Kirby took his fishing rod back and waited for the line to go taut. Spike wasn’t sure for how long, exactly, but it was eventually broken by the sound of flapping wings from above.

“Ah there you are!”

Twilight descended fairly quickly, coming to a landing just to the left of the pair. She was still a bit unsteady at it, but Spike could see that she was improving at flight pretty quickly–at least she wasn’t plowing trenches in the ground anymore. Her landing did, however, scare away a few fish, including a large blue one with yellow fins that had gotten curious and nearly bitten the line.

Kirby pouted at her. “You scared the fishies!”

Twilight blinked in surprise. “Was that a full sentence?” She shook her head. “Never mind, I thought you were going to go up there and ask Solaria and Lunaris to stop?”

Spike looked up at the sky, where the Sun was sitting there, undisturbed. “I didn’t get here until the situation was nearly fixed, anyway. And uh…” he looked down, a bit embarrassed. “I had a lot on my mind that I just wanted to talk to someone about.”

“Oh, Spike,” Twilight said softly, offering a wing for an embrace. As she hugged her little brother, she continued. “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”

Spike nodded. “Yeah, but I know you’re just gonna say no.”

Twilight frowned slightly and shifted so she could look at Spike directly as he broke the embrace. “What do you mean?”

Spike sighed. “I want to help. Directly, I mean. I don’t want to just be an errand colt. I can help! I’m a dragon!”

Twilight looked contemplative. “Listen, Spike, I’m going to be honest here. You’re a dragon, sure, but you’re ten.”

“I turn eleven in…” he began to protest before stalling. “How long have we been here?”

“Thirteen days,” Twilight answered immediately. “Which means that the Summer Sun Celebration is in three days, so your birthday isn’t for another month and a half.”

“Yeah, so I turn eleven soon,” Spike rebutted. “And you let me go off to see the Dragon Migration alone!”

“And I shouldn’t have done that,” Twilight said. “Even if Rarity, Dash, and I were all following you. I should’ve been there for you–explicitly–so you didn’t have to face Garble and the other bullies alone. I’m sorry.” She smiled softly at him and gave him a quick nuzzle. “But I will say, saving Peewee was an extraordinarily brave thing for you to do.”

Spike chuckled. “Heh, yeah. I’m still a bit sad we had to release him.”

Twilight giggled. “Spike, we live in a tree that’s also a public building. I think if we tried to raise a phoenix there the Mayor would have run us out of Ponyville personally. I’m sure that Princess Celestia and Philomena found a wonderful home for him.”

“That’s fair,” Spike agreed. “But…what does any of that have to do with me not being able to help out?”

Twilight sighed and pulled him into another hug. “You are a brave, brave young dragon, Spike, and I’m being a bit selfish here, but…” she sighed again, “I’m afraid. Afraid that you’ll get yourself into a situation where you’ll be hurt. Afraid that you might go off to help and not come back. It’s the same sort of fear that we felt whenever Shiny got called to deal with a monster attack somewhere.”

Spike frowned. “But, you know that dragons are tough. Really tough!”

Twilight was silent for a moment as she stared out across the lake. “Spike, how many ponies are there that you think could hold up a building?”

Spike frowned harder. “Well, you and any of the other princesses, and Sunset, obviously. Shining probably could with his shields, and Big Mac and Applejack are both strong enough to do that, maybe? Oh, and Pinkie definitely could.” He looked back up at his sister. “But I know I’m not powerful enough to do that. But I can take it! Remember that time you threw me through the wall?”

Twilight winced. “I am not a morning pony.” She shook her head. “But that’s not the point I’m getting at. I’m trying to say that even with that much power, ponies, dragons, whoever they are can get injured. Badly.”

Spike narrowed his eyes. “Did Sunset…”

“She’s stable,” Twilight said, interrupting any potentially morbid thoughts. “But I think she went up there to try and deal with the problem, and she was in bad shape when she crashed into Castle Dedede.”

Kirby, who had tuned out much of the sibling’s conversation, suddenly looked up at them and began reeling in his fishing line. “Sunset’s hurt?”

Twilight nodded, watching as he packed up his fishing gear. “I haven’t run a full diagnostic, since I came down here to get Spike as soon as I knew her condition was stable, but I’m heading back up there to finish a magical scan and talk with the doctors.”

“What are we waiting for, then?” Spike asked, breaking from the hug and quickly starting up the path. "We've got a unicorn to go see!"

“So, house arrest, huh?”

Starlight nodded. She and Sunburst in the room she had been given–though in her opinion that verb phrase should have been “jailed in”–in Canterlot Palace. It wasn’t a terrible room, by any means. It had a queen-sized bed, a nice bedside drawer stack, a fully stocked bookshelf, and a neat little tea table where she and Sunburst were sitting. But compared to Sire’s Hollow, or even her little village, it felt suffocating.

Starlight gestured at her horn, where an inhibitor ring was situated and magically stuck. “Three months in here with no magic and then a thousand hours of community service once that’s up, but it’s better than a prison cell.”

“True,” Sunburst agreed. “But-” he smiled, “at least it seems like you got off lightly.”

Starlight scuffed at the floor with a hoof. “I shouldn’t have. After what I did…I ruined my own life, Dad’s life, probably indirectly you and your mom’s, the lives of everypony who came to my village, and I nearly took Princess Luna’s cutie mark. I don’t know why I’m not rotting in a cell right now.”

Sunburst winced. Starlight’s trial had been, if not exactly large, long. It wasn’t extraordinarily public–the Canterlot Daily had run a small article on it on page twelve, and that was the extent of press that it got, rather odd for such a high-profile case–but it took four days of deliberation before a verdict was eventually reached. Sunburst was still a bit surprised that it even happened as fast as it had, given that the Summer Sun Celebration had forced a recess and how far a few of the witnesses had needed to travel, particularly some ponies from Starlight’s village and her own father.

The lawyers had been thorough.

Usually, for important cases like this, both reigning princesses would have presided as dual judges to deliberate among themselves for the final sentencing, but since Princess Luna had been one of Starlight’s victims, she was barred from overseeing the trial. Technically speaking, the only thing that stopped Starlight from being charged with high treason and thrown in Tartarus–Sunburst shuddered at the very thought–was both diarchs explicitly pardoning her of that before the trial even began. But even accounting for that, the witness testimonies were what allowed for such a light sentence for the rest of her crimes. Despite Starlight’s many wrongdoings, very few of her former villagers actually wanted her to wind up behind bars, and even the ones that seemed like they did weren’t aggressive about it. And Princess Celestia had agreed.

With a start, Sunburst realized that he had gotten himself lost in his thoughts and hadn’t responded to Starlight in nearly thirty seconds. “W-well,” he said, “I think that attitude was what convinced the Princess to not throw you in prison! You showed a willingness to change, which really I think is even more than they needed. Princess Celestia managed to get Discord of all creatures reformed, for goodness’ sake!”

A soft chuckle from the doorway prompted both ponies to look in that direction.

“Indeed,” Princess Celestia said, two guards warily looking in as she entered the room, though they did not follow. “You are correct, Sunburst.”

Sunburst fell straight out of his seat scrambling to turn around. “Y-your Highness!” he stuttered, sinking into a bow once he had righted himself.

Starlight just raised an eyebrow at him, got up without falling over herself, and gave a polite bow.

“Rise, my little ponies,” the Princess stated, no small amount of exasperation coloring her voice. Her horn lit up in golden light, and a third chair flashed into existence. “I simply want to speak with Miss Glimmer, here.”

“O-oh!” Sunburst said. “I can j-just be going, then.”

Princess Celestia smiled and sat down in the chair she had summoned. “Don’t be too hasty, Sunburst. This conversation involves you, as well.”

Sunburst blinked. “Oh.”

He and Starlight both took their own seats back at the table. Once everypony was situated, the Princess began. “So, Starlight, how are you feeling?”

Starlight looked confused for a moment before she answered. “Relieved, I guess?” she replied unsurely. “I mean, it kinda sucks that I’m stuck here for three months, but at least I have something to read!” She gestured to the bookshelf.

Celestia’s soft smile remained unchanged. “I’m glad to hear that you’re adjusting nicely, then. I did want to discuss the exact terms of your house arrest-”

“Stay in the room except for meals and using the restroom, and I have to be accompanied by at least three guards at all times outside of this room,” Starlight interrupted. “I’ve read the terms at least thrice by now.”

Celestia chuckled. “Well then, surely you also know that this arrangement is temporary until we could secure proper housing for you?”

“Yeah,” Starlight agreed, then blinked in surprise. “Wait, already?”

“Conditionally,” Celestia answered, holding up a hoof, “on Sunburst’s agreement.”

Sunburst looked up. “Huh?”

“I’ve considered Miss Glimmer’s case, and I believe that, for her recovery, she is most in need of a friend,” Celestia said, a knowing glint in her eye as she looked between them. “How amenable would you be to moving, Sunburst?”

“Uh…” Sunburst started, considering. “I don’t have that many things, I suppose. I’d have a lot of books to move, but I was only really in the Crystal Empire in the first place to talk to Sunset.” He cringed. “And well, you know how that turned out.” He tapped his chin in thought. “Though, I’m not sure how I’d feel moving back to Canterlot. This place…doesn’t have many good memories for me.”

“That is fine,” Celestia said. “We don’t have to have Starlight here, specifically, to keep her under house arrest. Luna and I were thinking that Ponyville might be a better option, assuming that the Bearers would be willing to help a few guards with making sure you serve your time.” Her smile turned ever so slightly mischievous. “Besides, Ponyville is in desperate need of a new librarian during Twilight’s…unplanned sabbatical.”

“Is that what we’re calling it?” Starlight asked.

“Wait wait wait,” Sunburst called, “isn’t the Ponyville library Princess Twilight’s house?”

Celestia nodded.

“And you want me and Starlight to live there?” Sunburst said, incredulous. “I’m sorry but that just feels…disrespectful, to me. Living in another pony's house like that.”

Celestia giggled, a sound that Sunburst had never expected to hear from royalty. “Oh, I am certain that Twilight would be quite cross with me if I didn’t assign somepony to watch over her books in her absence.”

Starlight frowned. “What about when she gets back?”

“According to Discord, that won’t be for a while yet, if we can get her back at all,” Celestia reported. “But we will be actively working on that. Once we do get Twilight back we can work something out with the Mayor, and I am going to have some choice words for this Void character when we do.” She stretched. "But that is for later. For now, there is somepony that wants to see you."

The guards moved, a flash of purple shot through the room, and suddenly there was an older unicorn stallion hugging Starlight. "Oh, my little pumpkin, I've missed you so much!"

"Dad?!"

Celestia leaned over and whispered into Sunburst's ear. "I think it's time we take our leave."

“Hey, I think she’s waking up!”

“About time! I wanna know what happened up there!”

“She’s not going to be in any position to discuss that for a while, Dedede.”

Sunset groaned as she came to, general soreness permeating her body. She could feel a few things wrapped around or poked into her, and based on the constant computerized pulse on her left she guessed one was an EKG and another was an IV drip.

Dedede’s infirmary was surprisingly well stocked, given the apparent technological state of Dreamland.

After a few seconds, she chanced opening her eyes. The bright lights of the room assaulted her retinas for a few moments, but the image quickly resolved itself. She had guessed right about landing near Castle Dedede, it seemed; Twilight, Spike, Dedede, and Bandana Dee were all standing near the room’s entrance, and two Waddle Dees in nurse’s garb were nearby.

“Did…” Sunset began, her voice feeling raspy from disuse. She licked her lips to wet them, noticing that her missing tooth had been replaced by some sort of implant in the process. Before she continued, Bandana Dee quickly excused himself from the room. “Did anyone get the number of the truck that hit me?”

One of the nurses frowned. At least, Sunset assumed that it was a frown based on how the Dee’s eyes turned. “Well, I’m not quite sure what you mean by that, but I can tell you that you did quite a number on yourself.” He produced a clipboard. “Even inside that shield of yours, you had multiple lacerations, a broken rib, and first-degree burns on your horn and forehead.”

“Not to mention that you burned so many calories that your body had begun digesting its own muscle,” the other nurse piped up. “We had to keep you on a diet of essentially pure maxim tomato paste just to keep you stable.”

“Also,” Twilight pitched in, “you had the absolute worst case of mana burn I’ve ever seen. What happened up there, Sunset?”

Sunset licked her dry mouth again. “How long was I out?”

“Over a week,” Spike answered. He winced. “We were worried for a bit that…that you wouldn’t recover.”

Internally, Sunset sighed in relief. If she had been out that long it meant that Marx hadn’t escaped Nova before it exploded, so Popstar was safe from him, at least. Before she could express that, Bandee ran back in with a glass of water. “Here, hopefully that helps your throat.”

On instinct, Sunset tried to reach out with her levitation. She reflexively winced as soon as she did, the usual mana burn headache making itself known. The spell was aborted almost immediately, but by that point she had begun to move the cup upwards. It wasn’t supposed to be much, just enough that she could lift it over to her.

It rocketed upwards and shattered on the ceiling.

“W-what?” Sunset stammered.

Most of the rest of the room was staring in shock, but Twilight only seemed mildly surprised. “That…was a bit more powerful than I thought it was going to be,” she muttered. “And also part of why I wanted you to explain what happened.”

Sunset looked the alicorn directly in the eyes. “Twilight, what happened to me?”

“Your mana pathways have expanded. Significantly,” Twilight explained. “As has your internal mana pool. It’s almost like you ascended without actually ascending.”

Sunset glanced down at her side, seeing nothing but her regular orange coat and, disappointingly, an obvious lack of wings.

“Alright everyone, shoo,” one of the nurses said. “You all can figure out exactly what happened later, we need to properly check everything with the patient now that she’s awake.”

Twilight outright pouted at being denied information, and Sunset chuckled–though that action caused her to wince in pain not long after. “It’s probably better to do that later, anyway,” she said. “Meta Knight will definitely want to know what happened.”

“And we can tell Kirby about the league thing!” Spike piped up.

A few hours later, Sunset was given a (mostly) clean bill of health and discharged from the infirmary. Castle Dedede didn’t exactly have a meeting room, per se, so she wound up wandering around a bit until she ran into Meta Knight, who directed her towards the banquet hall.

Meta Knight, as it turned out, had been hanging around Castle Dedede, waiting for her to wake up. Vul was around too, still overseeing the final bits of construction on the boxing room, and apparently Sailor Dee was currently in charge of the complex on Orange Ocean. The knight apparently knew the layout of Dedede’s castle better than the King himself, taking point on leading Sunset to where they were meeting.

The meeting was clearly makeshift, everyone sitting around a buffet table. Most of the beings there were making small talk with each other, besides Kirby, who was making his way through a sixteen-layer cake. He did take a bit of time out of his meal to wave at her as she entered, though.

Sunset didn’t really want to think about how the confection stayed up.

Her entrance to the hall very quickly shifted the atmosphere of the room. The moment she stepped hoof in there, she could feel the tension in the air as Meta Knight flapped to his seat and Sunset took one. No one really knew how to breach what everyone wanted to talk about, so they just sort of sat there in silence until Kirby finished his cake a few seconds later.

Swallowing happily, he grinned at Sunset. “You’re okay!”

Just like that, the tension shattered. Kirby’s childlike proclamation worked wonderfully to clear the air, and Sunset grinned right back. “Yep! You can’t keep this mare down for long!”

Meta Knight cleared his throat. “Yes, Miss Shimmer’s recovery is quite pleasant to see.” He looked at Sunset. “Though, we do still require an explanation. Perhaps, you should begin from the morning that Solaria and Lunaris began fighting.”

Sunset frowned as she considered just how much to tell them. She’d mention the Summoning Stars, of course, and how they summoned the Galactic Nova. And it was probably a good idea to go through what she had found on those planets. Her main concern was discussing her own ill-fated wish, but after a few seconds, she came to a decision.

She had to let Twilight know, at least, that Nova couldn’t get them back to Equestria.

“Well, I suppose I should start with when I woke up that morning to a headache, the sky fighting itself, and teleporting myself and Marx to the Fountain of Dreams.”

“That’s one heck of a teleport,” Spike commented.

Sunset nodded. “Yeah, but we needed a quick way there and I knew that the Fountain would prevent mana burn.”

Kirby looked curious. “Marx?” he asked.

“Where is the fella, anyway?” Dedede asked. “I haven’t seen him around for a while.”

Sunset cringed. “Marx is…” she frowned intensely, “we’ll get to that.”

That, at least, confused most of the rest of the table, though Meta Knight had a knowing look in his eyes.

“Anyway, once we reached the Fountain, the Star Rod resonated with me…”

She went on to briefly recount her experiences on each of Popstar’s neighboring planets, the expressions around the table ebbing and flowing as she did. From confusion about Floria’s weather, to horror (or in Meta Knight’s case, excitement) at Cavius’s challenges, to Vul seeming almost proud when he heard what happened on Mekkai. But eventually, Sunset had to face the music.

“So Nova asked me for a wish, and I…” she sighed. “I’m sorry. I wished for a way back to Equestria.”

There wasn’t any shouting, but in a way the silent disappointment she felt emanating from Bandana Dee, Twilight, and Spike was almost worse. Dedede neglected to say anything, presumably for fear of being called out for the fact that he absolutely would have done the same thing in her position. Meta Knight and Vul, though, seemed extremely understanding.

“That does make sense,” Meta Knight pointed out. “You had no particular stake in stopping Solaria and Lunaris’s conflict, especially if you made it back home. I think your decision was still selfish, but understandable.” He gave her a particularly pointed look. “However, you are clearly still here.”

Sunset nodded. “The wish didn’t work, because Nova couldn’t find Equestria, apparently.”

Spike had chosen the worst time to be taking a sip of water, because he performed a spit take right then and there. “What do you mean something like that couldn’t find Equestria?”

“Meta Knight, do your legends about Clockwork Stars say anything about their limits?” Twilight asked.

Meta Knight shook his head. “They do not. They often claimed their power to be truly limitless, but perhaps they are confined to a single universe, or even just this one.” He paused. “Regardless, more had to have happened.”

“Marx hijacked the wish,” Sunset replied. “I was too stunned to think of another before he jumped in and wished to rule Popstar.”

A series of gasps rang out around the table.

“He what?”

“That is…unexpected.”

“I always knew he was bad news.”

“Your Majesty, are you sure that doesn’t just stem from that time he tripped you with a banana peel?”

“Hey, that hurt, alright?”

Sunset cleared her throat, redirected everyone’s attention back to her. “After he made that wish, Nova started dumping power into him, and we fought.” She frowned. “Well, it’s more like I barely avoided certain death half a dozen times as he got used to his powers. I think, if he knew what was going to happen, he would’ve killed me immediately.”

“So how did you stop him?” Spike asked, enraptured in the story.

“Well, I thought that, since he was drawing power from Nova, if I could shut that down it would stop him from getting any stronger,” Sunset said.

“But Nova was massive!” Twilight exclaimed. “How in the world did you destroy that?”

“You all could see it from the surface, right?”

Most of the rest of the table nodded.

“So you saw the giant hole in its forehead?”

Another set of nods.

Sunset grinned. “I flew inside of it, got to its core, and started pulling magic out of the Warp Star I was on to blow shit up.” She shivered. “It was fucking painful, but it worked.”

“Language!” Kirby reprimanded.

Sunset gave him a deadpan look as Twilight tapped her chin. “I think I know what happened with your magic, then.” With a purple flash of light, Twilight summoned a rubber ball. “Here, try to levitate this.”

Sunset mentally shrugged, flared her horn as much as she was willing with the mana burn, and attempted to lift the ball a few centimeters off the table. It rose a full two meters before she got a handle on how much magic she was putting into it and–slowly–pulled it back down. “I uh…didn’t mean to do that.”

Twilight nodded, her hypothesis apparently supported. “When you started pulling magic out of the Warp Star, I think it overloaded your mana system,” she explained. “Now, usually, if you dump that much magic into a unicorn they’d turn into a fine red mist-”

Spike blanched. “Gee, Twi, thanks for that image.”

Twilight continued as if the interruption hadn’t even happened. “But whatever was going on with the Warp Star was stopping you from being ripped apart atom by atom! So when all that magic flooded your body with nowhere to go, it forced your mana pathways open and essentially burned them in place. You pretty much have the same mana pool and casting capabilities that I do, now.”

“Still no wings to go with it, though,” Spike pointed out.

“Wait, so I can cast more?” Sunset asked excitedly. “And easier?”

Twilight shook her head. “You can cast more, yeah, but you’ll need a lot finer control than what you had earlier, since you’re naturally attuned to how much mana you need to expend to cast something in proportion to how much you have total. Plus, Spike’s point about the lack of wings is actually pretty important.”

“Huh?” Sunset asked.

“You still absorb mana at the same rate as a unicorn–three times slower than alicorns do,” Twilight explained. “So despite having alicorn-level casting ability, you’re going to tire out a lot faster than an alicorn would and take a lot longer to recover if you exhaust yourself.”

Sunset nodded. “I guess that makes sense. So I’ll have to pace myself with magic now, got it.” She considered that for a moment. “You know, maybe that’s why teleporting out of Nova was so easy. That had to have been a teleport of upwards of a couple thousand kilometers.”

Twilight blinked. “You teleported out of that? From its core?”

“Well, I’m pretty sure I was running mostly on magic and adrenaline at that point,” Sunset countered, “and I had about a quarter of a second to react before I slammed into the wall at mach five hundred.”

“So what happened to Marx, then?” Dedede asked.

Sunset’s eyes widened as a haunted look came over them. “He…he was in there when Nova exploded. Even with as much power as he had, I don’t think he could’ve survived that, especially since he hasn’t shown up to try and take over the world yet.” She sank in on herself, feeling a bit numb to the outside world. “I didn’t want to kill him,” she whispered.

In nary a moment, she felt sensation again–particularly, the sensation of being hugged. Looking down, she saw Kirby, speckles of cake still spread around his cheeks, doing his best to wrap his nubby little arms around her. They didn’t speak, but Sunset still moved her other hoof to pat him on the back.

“Thanks, Kirby,” She said.

“The decision to take a life, even if necessary, is never easy,” Meta Knight mentioned. “You made the right choice to save yourself, Sunset.”

Twilight took a deep breath. “I agree.”

Spike looked at her in surprise. “Woah. I did not expect that to come from you.”

“This world is more dangerous than Equestria, Spike,” Twilight elaborated. “A lot more. I wish it was never necessary, but sometimes, it’s the only option. And it’s not like it’s a foreign concept in Equestria, either. Remember what happened to King Sombra?”

“I was a bit occupied trying to not lose my lunch after Cadance caught me,” Spike admitted.

“He died,” Twilight said bluntly. “I was stuck in that trap at the time, but from what my friends told me, the Crystal Heart vaporized him. I don’t know why it decided that that was the only way, but it did.”

Spike brought his claws up to his face, where he stared at them like they were bloody.

Quickly, Twilight wrapped a wing around him. “And don’t you dare blame yourself, Spike. You might’ve gotten the Crystal Heart to Cadance, but Sombra was the one who got himself killed by being such a horrible dictator that the Heart just blew him to pieces.”

An ahem from Dedede interrupted them. “As riveting a story that is, I think Sunset had more to say?”

Sunset frowned. “Not too much. After I teleported out of Nova, I yelled at the Sun and Moon that it was gonna blow and tried to aim for Castle Dedede when I landed.” She cringed. “And uh, landing a Warp Star half-conscious is not a good idea.” Suddenly, she brightened up again. “Oh, but there’s one other thing I wanted to mention.” Flaring her horn, she summoned the leather-bound book she had found. “I found this on Aquarius, but I can’t read it and it’s definitely not Somnic.” Slowly, she levitated it over to Meta Knight. “I was wondering if you had any ideas?”

Meta Knight seemed to frown behind his mask as he opened the book to the first page. “This seems like some ancient form of Astral,” he said. “My language had a character shift some fifteen hundred years ago, but I recognize some of these words.” His eyes narrowed. “But only a few. The word for ‘star’ has been virtually unchanged over the millennia, as has the word ‘dream.’ Both appear quite often in this.” He handed it back, and Sunset took it in her telekinetic field before storing it again. “Do you know how old it is?”

“Two thousand years, minimum,” Sunset said. “There’s a diagram later on that seems to indicate that it’s older than Mekkai.”

Vul snapped his wing, a strange sound to come from a bird. “Ah, that’s where I recognized those characters from!” he suddenly said. “My grandpappy took a few pictures of the area near the Fountain back when he founded the company on Mekkai, and the writing carved into the metal around it looked just like that!”

“Oh, so that was your family’s company?” Sunset asked. “Sorry if we might’ve started a revolution there.”

Vul snorted. “Please, go right ahead on that. My sister and I had a...difference of opinion, let’s say, on how to manage the place after our dad passed, but since she’s older she got the final say. I got off of that sinking ship as soon as I could.”

“Regardless, would you mind bringing that book to Orange Ocean in the future?” Meta Knight asked. “I would like to analyze it with more tools available to me than just my mind.”

“The doc told me to lay off the exercise for a couple weeks,” Sunset replied, “but as soon as I get the all-clear, I’ll be there.”

“Well howdy there, Yer Highnesses!” Applejack greeted in a bow at Ponyville’s train station as Cadance and Shining Armor stepped off of the train.

It was around five in the morning, well before Princess Celestia was scheduled to raise the Sun. Ponyville’s street lights were generally pretty subpar, but the light of the moon was more than enough for Applejack to navigate by. The farmer was just about the only one of Twilight’s friends who was up at this hour, so she volunteered to greet the ruling couple of the Crystal Empire when word had come that they would be arriving extremely early to see Discord’s window for themselves.

The previous few weeks after witnessing Sunset’s adventures in space had been…interesting. Starlight and Sunburst moving into Twilight’s old place on Celestia’s dime had come as a bit of a shock, though the group of friends were all generally alright with it when the Princess explained her reasoning. It was a bit weird having three guards hang around at all times to keep an eye on Starlight, though.

(Technically, there were four agents of the Crown watching the mare under house arrest, but nopony but Celestia and Agent Sweetie Drops needed to know her current mission.)

Applejack offered to take some of the pair’s bags as they stepped down from the platform and began making their way towards Fluttershy’s house. “So, why’d you two come down here so early, anyhow?”

Cadance yawned deeply. “It’s the earliest we could come,” she explained. “Those…what did Discord call them again when he came up to tell us what was going on?”

“Plundervines, dear,” Shining reminded, as alert as ever. “Some of them nearly managed to breach the Crystal Heart’s barrier, and dealing with the paperwork and labor of removing half a kiloton of frozen vines from the snow and clearing the tracks took the better part of three weeks.”

“Heh, cleanup here took a while too,” Applejack said. “Rainbow was complainin’ for days ‘bout the clouds.” She chuckled. “Well, really she was grumblin’ ‘bout how the Mayor had her workin’ ‘round the clock on it. Ah think she was pretty happy to get out there an’ do some cloudbustin’ herself.”

Shining nodded, though Cadance just stared at her for a moment. “Is your accent thicker in the morning?” She yawned again. “Because I think I understood about half of the words you said there.” She shook her head with a slight smile. “Goodness, I think I need a coffee.”

“Ah’m sure Flutters can getcha somethin’ when we reach her place,” Applejack snickered. “Jus’ don’t take anythin’ Discord gives ya. Sunburst drank enough o’ Discord’s wine ta give himself a pretty bad hangover, but instead o’ the usual symptoms he was apparently vomitin’ rainbows and had dreams ‘bout polka-dotted elephants.”

“Did Starlight tell you about that one?” Shining asked.

“Eyup,” Applejack responded. “Y’all know ‘bout what’s goin’ on, then?”

“Aunties Celestia and Luna briefed us on the situation when they moved her here,” Cadance replied. “I still can’t believe how lightly she got off.”

Applejack shrugged. “Eh, the Princesses said they had some sorta plan for her to help get Twilight back, an’ she’s got three guards watchin’ her all the time.”

“Speaking of...” Shining said, “Sergeant Sharpwing!”

A pegasus guard, who Applejack hadn’t even noticed in the tree next to them, fell out of it in surprise that she had been noticed. She squawked a bit as she corrected herself in midair, landing with a bit of a thud before immediately saluting. “Sir, yes, Captain Armor, Sir!”

Shining raised an eyebrow. “At ease, Sergeant. I’m not your CO anymore.”

She grinned a bit, not dropping the salute. “Sir, yes, former Captain Armor, Sir!”

Shining kept his stern expression, but Applejack could see just the tiniest corners of his mouth turn up. “Shouldn’t you be at your post?”

Sharpwing’s eyes widened before she took off for the center of town fast enough to make Rainbow Dash jealous.

“How’d ya see her?” Applejack asked as they restarted their trek down the road out of Ponyville proper. “Ah’ve gotta have seen that tree over a thousand times and Ah didn’t even notice anythin’!”

Cadance chuckled. “Shining’s got quite the bag of tricks.”

The stallion in question pointed backwards, where underneath the tree lay a few pegasus feathers. “It’s not so much a trick as it is learning who’s who. I was Sharpwing’s commanding officer for around three years. You could never, never put her on surveillance, because she always got her wings caught in branches.”

Applejack laughed. “Ah’m gonna have ta remember that one if Rainbow ever tries to say she wasn’t nappin’ in my trees! Betcha there’s a whole bunch o’ blue feathers ‘round Sweet Apple Acres.”

By now, they had pretty much reached Fluttershy’s house, which the royal couple looked up at. “So, this is Fluttershy’s cottage?” Cadance asked. “It’s homey.”

“Oh right, y’all’ve never been here afore!” Applejack realized. “Don’tcha worry ‘bout anythin’. Flutters gets up early all the time ta care for her animals.”

She knocked on the door, and there were a few moments before anything happened. Soon enough, though, there was the tell-tale sound of that demon rabbit throwing a carrot at the door for daring to wake him up, and Fluttershy’s soft voice carrying through the door. “Now Angel, that’s not very nice.”

The door creaked open, revealing the yellow pegasus, dressed in a nightgown and stifling a yawn. “Oh, good morning Applejack.” She opened the door a little further. “And Princess Cadance and Shining Armor! Was that today?”

Cadance nodded. “May we come in?”

“Oh, of course!” Fluttershy said, moving away from the door. “You’re here to get to Discord’s house, right?”

“That we are,” Shining agreed.

They entered the cottage, and Fluttershy began fluttering around and opening every cupboard and drawer that she could.

Cadance and Shining both blinked. “What's she doing?” Cadance asked.

Applejack groaned. “Discord can’t be bothered ta put the door ta his place in the same spot every time, so we’ve gotta check everywhere.”

“Found it!” Fluttershy’s voice rang out. “It’s in my bathroom mirror cupboard today!”

They made their way over to Fluttershy just as she was pulling herself out of her mirror. She fell to the ground with a slight oof, but smiled up at them all the same.

“Before we go,” Cadance said, and then yawned again, “could we get some coffee?”

“Oh, you can go on ahead,” Fluttershy smiled. “I’ll make some and catch up. How do you like yours?”

“Black,” Cadance answered.

Fluttershy looked at Shining.

He looked distinctly embarrassed. “...How much cream do you have?”

The pegasus smiled softly. “I’ll be sure to cut yours with some milk.”

With that, she left for her kitchen and Applejack began moving towards the door as well. “Whelp, Ah best be goin’. It’s been a pleasure seein’ ya, but the farm chores ain’t gonna do themselves!”

Now alone in Fluttershy’s bathroom, Cadance and Shining stared at the open mirror cupboard. They couldn’t quite see the other side, what with the entire thing glowing a bright white. “So I guess we…just go in?” Cadance asked.

Shining shrugged. “Let me go first.”

He clambored up, struggling to fit his broad frame in the cupboard, before it felt like he began to fall forward. He tumbled aimlessly for a bit before suddenly regaining a sense of direction and being launched upwards. Moments later, Shining was expelled from a drawer of a filing cabinet in Discord’s living room and landed uncomfortably on the floor.

A few seconds later, his wife landed on top of him.

“Oh goody, visitors!” Discord’s voice exclaimed from the other end of the room. He was seated on a sofa that was an appalling shade of neon green, but Shining’s eyes were more focused on the screen behind it, displaying Twilight and Spike sleeping comfortably in a large room.

“Hello, Discord,” Cadance greeted, stepping off of her husband.

Discord seemed uninterested in greeting them back, instead shrugging. “Is that all for today? Ah well, I suppose the Princess of Hormones and Mister Goodie-Four-Shoes will have to do as an audience.”

There was a flash, and suddenly Discord, Cadance, and Shining were all seated on the sofa, which had changed colors from neon green to an equally horrible neon orange.

“You’ve come just in time!” the draconequus exclaimed, a bowl of popcorn situated on his lap. “Something interesting is happening!” He snapped his tail and summoned a tablet of some sort, which displayed another image. “I had to work a bit to get this second window up, but it lets me monitor the whole system! And something new just entered it!”

A Clockwork Star was a powerful thing, capable of rewriting reality itself if commanded to. It was the magnum opus of its creators, and the final nail in their coffin as they finally created a weapon too powerful for them to counter.

The destruction of one did not go unnoticed.

It took a while for the Darkness to determine what had happened, but when it did, it made sure to send a scout. This piece of Darkness in particular had been separate from the Whole for nearly a millennium, one of the last to have been severed without being immediately reabsorbed, and it developed its own sentience over time. That capability for advanced decision-making, as irksome as it might be for the Whole, was what made it such a great scout.

As it reached the place where the Clockwork Star was destroyed, it stared down at the star-shaped planet below. It could sense something down there, something that could actually prove a threat to it. Carefully, it split itself in two. One piece retained its thoughts and intelligence, with the knowledge of its mission. The other was naught more than a dumb blob of Darkness, given a single goal: distract the Voidspawn.

As it sent the blob on its way, the Darkness considered its options. Its goal was simply to reduce the overall happiness of this world to make a full-scale invasion easier, and there were a few ways it could do that. It could hardly target the Dreamwater by itself, but there were other options. It descended through the clouds, briefly considering a series of floating islands before determining that its reach would be too small. Further down, it saw its prize: a set of true islands connected by rainbow-colored bridges. It could feel the disgusting emotions they were giving off, even from all the way up where it was.

Now it just needed a host.

Choosing a location was easy. There was a castle upon a mountaintop where it could feel true power simply emanating from. It sped there as quickly as it could, and began searching inside.

For a moment, it stopped to look at a blue penguin of sorts. It was certainly powerful, but the Darkness could feel a better option nearby.

A bit further, and it passed a room that it could feel the remnants of power in, but its wielder seemed to be out at the moment. A pity.

It was a few doors down that the Darkness finally selected its target: a sleeping winged unicorn, softly snoring with a tiara atop her head. Greedily, the Darkness attempted to invade her body, aiming for total control of her mind. The tiara pulsed brightly, however, and the Darkness retreated, hissing. Whatever that thing was was preventing it from choosing the pony as a host.

Worse yet, its attempts at possession had caused the creature to stir. She was restless in her sleep, and seemed on the verge of waking up. The Darkness needed a new plan, and fast.

Frantically, it searched its senses around the room before settling on the only other occupant. It was unideal to use such a weak form as a host, but it couldn’t afford to be found out this early.

The dragon would have to do.

Author's Note

Spike did say that he wanted to be involved in the action, now didn't he.

I feel like epilogue chapters to arcs always wind up extremely long for me. I probably should've split this one into two chapters, but there weren't exactly any good points to do that, so here, take this 10,000-word behemoth!

I suppose that this isn't just an epilogue to Milky Way Wishes, because it also serves as a prologue of sorts for our next arc: Dream Land 2. This one...won't be quite as long as MWW. Probably.

Chapter XXV: The Encroaching Darkness

Twilight squirmed a bit as she awoke. Everything felt…off. As if she had woken up and everything was shifted slightly to the left. It was rather disorienting, and for a moment, her sense of balance was entirely thrown off. It left an odd taste in her mouth, even, a lot like when she had used dark magic to open up Sombra’s staircase; there was a permeating sensation of wrongness around her. But she knew that she hadn’t used dark magic since then, which just made everything even more baffling.

The splitting headache certainly didn’t help things.

A slight purple glow drew her eyes upwards, and they narrowed in confusion. Why was the Element of Magic glowing?

As it did, though, the headache began to recede and the feeling of something being wrong faded. It was a soothing feeling, having harmony magic wash over her. It was nowhere near the same scale of what happened when she and her friends actually used the Elements, of course, but the feeling of rejuvenation was the same.

Her mind a bit clearer, she finally noticed the movement in the room. It was still dark enough that it was difficult to see, but the glow of her Element was bright enough to make out Spike’s silhouette. Frowning, Twilight cast a brightening spell and glanced at the clock. It was just past five thirty–well earlier than she had ever seen Spike willingly get up. “Spike?” she asked. “Why are you awake?”

Spike froze. “I, ah…couldn’t sleep,” he replied, not turning around. “I’m just going to get some water. You can go back to sleep…” he paused, as if trying to remember something, “Twilight Sparkle.”

Twilight yawned and nodded, content with the explanation. As Spike left the room, though, her brows furrowed. Why couldn’t he sleep, exactly? They couldn’t have nightmares in Dreamland, the Fountain made sure of that, so it had to be something troubling him during his waking hours. Was he still upset with her? She supposed that she had been a tad bit overprotective of him ever since Kirby ate him, what with her sticking by his side at nearly all times. But she thought that she’d worked that out with him when she impressed upon him how badly Sunset had been injured during her experience with Nova. Hay, she’d even let him sit in on the planetary defense league-thingy meeting (they really needed a name for that). And he hadn’t been having any issues sleeping lately, anyway, so she couldn’t for the life of her fathom why-

Twilight jolted into an upright sitting position and let out half a gasp as she realized something else had been bugging her as well.

Spike hadn’t called her by her full name in years.

It was always “Twilight” or “Twi” with him, but never “Twilight Sparkle.” The last time he’d called her that was over six years ago, back before he lived with her parents. For the two years between when Princess Celestia took Twilight on as her personal protégé and when she considered Spike old enough to be reared by ponies other than herself, the Princess always called Twilight by her full name. Spike, being a rather young dragon at the time, had been around for her lessons and caught on to what Princess Celestia called her. That didn’t change until he started living with her parents and learned that everyone close to her (other than the Princess) just called her “Twilight.”

For a moment, Twilight frowned to herself as she thought about that timeline. She passed the entrance exam to CSGU over a decade ago and had about two years of regular schooling until Princess Celestia personally started teaching her. It had been impossible to avoid the rumors around the palace, that the Princess had only taken her on to fill the hole left by her previous student’s disappearance, but Twilight had never pried. Even as socially awkward as she was as a filly, she knew that that was considered rude.

Though, Sunset did seem to know Princess Celestia personally, and did seem to be the right age…

Twilight shook her head. She could ask Sunset directly about this later, but she had something else to worry about right now.

She clambered out of bed and wrenched the door open with her telekinesis, skidding out into the hallway. “Spike!” she called.

Spike was already near the end of the hallway. Instead of turning around, or even just slowing down, he kept pressing forward, entirely ignoring her shout. Eventually, he reached the corner, where Castle Dedede’s residential suites ended in an intersection with the castle’s main hallway. Spike turned left, continuing down it.

The way to the kitchens was to the right.

Even more sure that something was wrong, Twilight picked up the pace. Fluttering her wings a bit to stay balanced, she rounded the corner after him. “Spike, wait up!” she shouted again, lighting her horn.

It was more difficult to get Spike in her telekinetic grip than she expected. Far more difficult. It was as if his body was actively resisting her magical influence, trying to reject the foreign intrusion as he slowed to a stop and was lifted into the air. Eventually, it became too much for Twilight to maintain, and she dropped him. But not before managing to spin him around, illuminated by the shaft of moonlight coming in through the window next to him.

She gasped, knowing that she would have dropped him in surprise even if her telekinesis hadn’t failed.

Her little brother’s eyes, she knew, were green. A brilliant emerald green, to be precise. She’d been on the receiving end of those little green eyes many a time in the last decade, from when he was four and begging for an extra ruby at desert, to when they lit up in joy and adoration as she subdued that ursa minor, to recently, when those emerald-hued irises were teary and the two comforted each other over their shared longing for home.

These eyes were not green. Not Spike’s.

Instead, they were blacker than the blackest of nights. Twin pools of darkness, unmoving, unblinking, stared at her. Staring into them was like staring into the void, and for a few moments Twilight was paralyzed with fear as her ever-active brain provided an explanation.

She was familiar with psychoturgy, of course. It had been brought up extensively in her CSGU ethics course and she was familiar enough with the theory to cast certain spells in the school–the Want-it-Need-it incidents more than proved that. But mind magic–or at least, mind-control–always left its victim’s eyes in a poor state, usually shrunk to pinpricks as they endlessly pursued whatever goal the caster set for them. But these eyes, terrifyingly, held none of the usual tells that this was just a simple psychoturgical spell that she had to shake Spike out of.

She could tell that Spike’s eyes–no, she corrected herself, the eyes of whatever was controlling him–held that spark of intelligence. That something had taken her brother’s mind hostage and was puppeting his body around in his absence.

Then, before Twilight could get a hold of herself and properly confront the situation, Spike whirled around and took off.

He got all the way around the next corner before she recovered and started galloping after him. He was gunning for Castle Dedede’s front gates, seemingly hellbent on getting out of there. The corridor they were in now led directly to that exit, and Twilight galloped even faster to try and stop him. Summoning some earth pony and pegasus strength, she made a flying leap, gaining on him with every second.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, she managed to physically grab hold of Spike’s left arm in her hoof. With this proximity, her Element began properly glowing again, and with a start Twilight realized that whatever this was must have tried to possess her before going after Spike.

The darkness in Spike’s left eye receded, and just for a moment, Twilight could see her little brother at the helm again. The eye was wide, almost shaking, and prominently displayed his utter terror. But to Twilight’s minimal joy, it was green.

Then the moment ended, and Spike’s right arm shot at her chest. Being clawed by a dragon was a novel experience, and a painful reminder that Spike’s claws were sharp. She gasped at the sudden pain, the attack forcing her to let go of his arm. She was forced back further as Spike jumped up, kicked her in the chest with both of his legs, and performed a mid-air backflip to land on his feet as she took a tumble backwards. In a horrifying sequence, she could watch in real time as the darkness reclaimed its territory and Spike’s left eye turned black once again.

Flames jutted out of the corners of Spike’s mouth, but they were not his usual green fire. Twilight, still recovering from having the wind knocked out of her, could only watch helplessly as impossibly black flames shot upwards, enveloping a wooden support beam near the ceiling. They ate through the sides of it like acid, dropping the beam directly between her and Spike and obscuring him from view.

It was almost a trivial matter to summon her magic and quell the flames, though they put up far more of a resistance than regular fire would. Reattaching the support beam to its proper place near the ceiling was easy as well, as powerful adhesive charms were among the simplest of kinetic spells to perform–she’d just need to check up on it sometime and get a proper replacement beam in place. But in the few seconds the whole thing took her, Spike had vanished.

“No,” Twilight whispered, “no, no no no NO!”

Castle Dedede’s gates glowed violet and flew open in Twilight’s telekinetic grasp, slamming against the sides of the castle with an ear-ringing bang. “SPIKE!” the alicorn shouted into the night, desperation coloring her voice. “Where are you?” She choked out a sob. “Where…where did you go?”

It was no use, of course. He had vanished off into the night.

She looked down at her chest, three ugly red gashes laying where Spike’s claws had scored a hit. They weren’t terribly deep, despite the immense pain, and it was nothing some food wouldn’t be able to fix. But for the second time in under a month, physical pain was far from Twilight’s primary concern.

As a drop of blood hit the ground below her, a tear splashed down just next to it.

“My aunts briefed us that you can't do anything to get them out of there, but is there really-”

Discord groaned, cutting Cadance off. “Listen, as much as I adore the mayhem this whole situation has been causing, do you really think so little of me? That I would allow my one and only friend in the universe to undergo so much distress from this?”

Cadance’s face displayed a ghost of a smile as she realized Discord’s admission, but a low growl from her husband prevented her from directly responding. “How far along is research on how to break in?”

“Not very,” Cadance sighed. “Aunties Celestia and Luna have been too busy dealing with the political fallout of Twilight going missing to properly organize it.”

“I do hear that that Sunburst fellow has been doing as much reading as he can in regards to it,” Discord chimed in with a shrug. “I wouldn’t put too much stock in it, though. Why, are you going to try and help?”

“My little brother just got possessed,” Shining growled, “and you expect me to just sit here and do nothing?”

A gasp behind them drew their attentions away from the screen as Fluttershy accidentally dropped the tray she was holding. Three coffee mugs and a teacup clattered to the floor, though the strange properties of Discord’s house prevented any of them from shattering or spilling (one did, however, bounce all the way up and stick to the ceiling). “Spike’s been possessed?” the pegasus asked.

Discord snapped a talon, teleporting the tray and cups in front of him, the three coffee mugs balanced precariously atop the teacup. “In a manner of speaking.”

Cadance raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure how you can just call that a ‘manner of speaking,’ given that we saw that thing directly possess him.”

Discord stroked his beard in thought as Fluttershy distributed the drinks, reminding herself what they had as she did so. “Black, cut with milk, and I made yours just how you like it, Discord!”

Discord raised an eyebrow. “Oh, and how would that be?”

Fluttershy winked. “It’s a secret!”

Discord shrugged. “To answer your earlier question, Mister Armor, I’ll repeat what I told Celly: I’m just outclassed. I can’t get anypony in or out of there, so yes, I do expect you to sit here and do nothing. Because that’s all we can do!”

Even Discord sounded displeased with his own limits, on that one.

“How did you get a window in, then?” Shining asked. “I know shields, and one that’s supposed to be opaque to everything should be able to prevent windows like this unless it’s weakening!”

“Oh, it is,” Discord confirmed nonchalantly.

Everypony was silent for a moment. “So could you…” Fluttershy trailed off.

“Given enough time and effort, I probably could force my way in,” Discord noted.

Shining’s horn lit up. “So why aren’t you doing that right now?”

Cadance comfortingly rubbed her husband’s foreleg. “Honey, I know it’s vexing, but I don’t think threatening the chaos god in his own home is a good idea.”

“It's cute that you think you could do anything to me,” Discord agreed. Eventually, though, he did answer. “The problem is that time component. Why, sure, I could use basically all of my magic around the clock for a few thousand years and take down Void’s barrier, but why in the world would I do that?”

“A few…thousand?” Shining asked in disbelief.

“Well, that is an optimistic estimate,” Discord mentioned. “That thing’s been up for over two millennia and only just weakened to the point that I could get visual and audio from there.” He shrugged again. “But hey, you ponies do always excel at surprising me. Maybe you’ll figure something out.”

Fluttershy cleared her throat. “So, um, the possession?”

“Ah right,” Discord remembered, “Spike’s been possessed by a darkness monster alien thing.”

The pegasus looked back at the drawer she’d crawled out of with the coffee. “This is big,” she noted, “I’ll go get the others.”

“Good luck waking up Rainbow Dash!” Discord called as she vanished. Taking a sip of the coffee she’d given him, a surprised look passed over his face before he nodded his approval. Exactly how he liked it, indeed.

Though he was a bit confused on how Fluttershy had managed to get her hooves on kitchen sink flavoring.

Teleporting with a host was always tricky if the host was unable to teleport on its own, but the Darkness cared not for the intricacies involved. It simply recognized the danger of being expelled from its host and took measures to prevent that, namely warping it and its host a ways down the mountain. Picking itself up and dusting itself off, the Darkness began making its way south–towards the rainbow bridges it had seen earlier.

Still, it took far more energy to teleport than had been ideal. The Darkness was far from annoyed at that–it couldn’t feel much of anything, after all–but it was something for it to take note of. Its attempt at enough infiltration to get away unseen had been foiled as well, and it did feel as close to annoyance as it could that its quick skim of the dragon’s memories to find the purple mare’s name had proven to be insufficient.

Its mission remained unchanged, however. This planet had a surfeit of emotion, sure, but it was so intensely full of Dream that it was worth putting in the effort to prepare it for invasion, even if simply being here weakened the Darkness considerably. Those islands were essentially condensed emotion in-and-of themselves, so destroying the bridges should reduce the overall happiness of the population and–if the Darkness was right with its estimates–do nicely to prepare.

Wh-what’s going on? the dragon’s voice echoed through his head.

The Darkness, of course, did not respond.

Where am I? Why…why can’t I control my legs?

The dragon’s mental voice was becoming increasingly panicked. This was of no concern to the Darkness, though it could prove to be a problem later on. Left unchecked, a panicked mind may manage to take back control for a few seconds. If that happened during some critical moment, it could be an issue. Thus, sure in its path, the Darkness sent a command at the dragon’s mind.

Rest.

Who said that? Wh-where are you? The dragon’s thoughts took a moment to compose themselves as many ideas flashed across the mindscape at once. Y-you used me to hurt Twilight!

So, the dragon was being a bit feisty. Clearly he had a stronger Heart than the Darkness had expected, but it was no matter. Subduing such minds was only a slightly more complicated process than simply taking control and keeping it. Sacrificing a slight bit of power, the Darkness began siphoning away the emotion from the Dragon’s mind.

Rest.

Why are you doing this? Why did you hurt Twilight?

Rest.

Hey, isn’t this town near where Kirby lives?

Rest.

Who are you, anyway?

Rest.

…Why did I care, again?

Rest.

The dragon’s thoughts gave the mental equivalent of a yawn before being silenced. The Darkness gathered up the emotion it had siphoned off and produced a small blob of itself at the tip of the dragon’s claw. With a flinging motion, it threw it into a bush as it passed by, and the constant drain on its power stopped. Fear was by far the easiest emotion for it to handle–being such a primal instinct, it was closer to apathy than anything else–but prolonged exposure could still prove complicated.

That issue resolved, the Darkness considered its surroundings. True to the dragon’s earlier thoughts, it could feel the Voidspawn nearby, but thankfully it was asleep. If all went well, the planet’s emotions would be drained and the Darkness would have overtaken all before it even knew what was happening.

The Darkness did, however, pick up the pace a bit. This scout in particular hadn’t been around the last time the Darkness encountered a Voidspawn, but it had brought that information with it when it split from the Whole. That encounter had gotten the Darkness sealed away for multiple decades, though not without having managed to drain the Voidspawn of all emotion other than anger. Encountering another one without taking every possible precaution was not in the Darkness’s to-do list.

Hence, its distraction.

Having left the village but still several kilometers north of its destination, the Darkness took a proper look at its host’s memories as it traveled. It had banked on fire breathing being an option and fortunately lucked out on that, but it didn’t want to chance anything else while so low on power.

It skimmed through much of the dragon’s earlier memories, though it paused on noticing one thing in particular. A single being capable of moving a star, or at least rotating an entire planet? Far from preposterous, in the Darkness’s experience, but certainly unique. It would have to figure out what world the dragon came from–clearly it wasn’t this one–and pass that information on to the Whole; it was a prime target for later assimilation.

It pressed on, looking for anything that might give away any of the dragon’s abilities. They were…disappointingly few. The fire breath could be used for storage and transportation, which was useful and probably how the Darkness got away with teleporting at all. The dragon was also absurdly durable and its claws and teeth were appreciably sharp, along with having a rather long and dexterous tongue, but that was it. It would have to hold off on using its true power until it had removed the stifling cloud of emotion permeating the very air around it.

It did, however, stumble across one memory that could prove useful. One of the dragon spontaneously growing to the size of a skyscraper and shrinking back down, seemingly powered by his own greed. That was an emotion, so using such an ability that way was right out for the Darkness. But if it could be induced artificially…

It selected a cell at random and sent a probe in there to start reading the dragon’s genetic code. It was a complicated probe of Darkness, running a search algorithm to compare genes with the proteins they coded for and determine which was responsible for the rapid growth, but it would be more than worth it if the Darkness was able to manually activate and deactivate it.

Just as it made sure that the search was underway, the Darkness finally reached its destination. A great bridge of rainbow arced from the mainland to an island covered in yellowing grass. The Darkness could feel the repulsion from the sheer concentration of emotions in it, but was undeterred. It stepped onto the bridge.

Color drained away under its foot, the many-hued rainbow giving way to monochrome. The Darkness’s lower claws dug into the bridge, and cracks emanated out from where it stepped.

It took another step, and the process repeated.

Then another.

Soon enough, it had covered the nearly kilometer-long bridge. As soon as it took its last step onto the island, the entire thing dissolved, flaking apart like dust in the wind as its destruction traveled from the mainland all the way to the island. Finally, the last little bit coiled up into a floating yellow gemstone, shaped almost like a droplet. For a moment, the Darkness debated whether or not to keep it. Destroying it wasn’t an option–doing so would just unleash the pent-up emotion that had been emanating from the bridge. It had originally planned to hide it somewhere on the island, but a quiet voice–probably some influence from the dragon, the Darkness had never been able to subdue everything about its host–was disagreeing.

Keep it.

And the Darkness did. It took the yellow droplet in its claw and breathed a lick of green and black flame over it–green for the magic, black to keep the emotion contained. It vanished into magical storage just as the Sun started to rise, and a pulse of apathy soared out as a significant source of the planet’s ambient emotion was suddenly just gone.

The Darkness turned around and began its journey to the next bridge. But imperceptibly, even to it, the dragon’s spine grew just a bit longer.

Kirby was usually a pretty heavy sleeper, only ever really woken by food or someone directly shaking him. He’d even once fallen clean out of his bed and just continued on snoring away. But he had gotten to bed earlier than usual the previous night, so the giant thump of something impacting the roof of his house at high speeds was enough for him to jolt awake.

He wasn’t happy about it, though. The Sun hadn’t even risen, yet!

He stomped up to his door, ready to give whoever had dared to wake him at this hour a piece of his mind. He wrenched it open and stopped short, though, at the creature in front of him. It was new!

Its body was a dark blue. Nearly black, even. It didn’t really have any defining features, just being a sort of blob shape, but even as Kirby looked, two eyes blinked open. A wide, dopey grin spread across it, and a long tongue lolled out. In lieu of any other appendages, the creature waved its tongue in greeting.

“Hi!” Kirby responded, waving back with a wide smile of his own. This, he decided, was to be a new friend. “I’m Kirby!” He tilted his head and waited for a response.

The creature seemed to be a bit confused at the concept of names. It narrowed its eyes and balanced on its tongue, but didn’t answer.

Curiously, Kirby poked it, a bit of material sticking to his hand as he pulled it away. “Gooey!” he decided to call it.

Gooey seemed satisfied with its new name, hitting the ground again and giving Kirby a lick. It bounced off, and Kirby realized what was going on. Gooey wanted to play tag! He loved a good game of tag!

The two chased each other around for a while, and eventually Kirby decided to invite Gooey inside for breakfast. It was still a bit early, but he was never one to ignore an opportunity for food!

The Sun started to peak over the horizon as they went inside, but before Kirby could reach for his cupboards, it suddenly felt like the world was just a bit…duller. Kirby was undeterred, albeit confused, and shook it off rather easily. Gooey, on the other hand, did not. It was shaking, almost like it was panicking at the sudden shift in the world’s emotions.

Carefully, Kirby did the only thing he could do when he saw a friend in pain. He walked up and gave Gooey a big ol’ hug.

Instantly, the shaking stopped. It felt like there was some sort of connection between them, but Kirby didn’t particularly care what that connection was. All he cared about was that he had made a new friend, and that that new friend was happy, now.

Gooey’s appearance had changed, too. The darkness in its form had receded a bit, giving way for an ocean blue coloration. Its smile seemed just a touch more genuine as well, and it maintained a happy grin as it broke from Kirby’s embrace. It bounced up a solid couple of meters and lashed out its tongue, grabbing a box of cereal from Kirby’s shelf.

Kirby giggled and puffed up to grab one as well.

A knock at the door interrupted the breakfast plans, though. Kirby jumped over and opened it, entirely prepared to invite a third face to breakfast. He blinked in confusion when he saw the spear-wielder there, though. “Bandee?”

“Hey, Kirby,” Bandana Dee replied. “Sorry I couldn’t swing by on happier circumstances, but could you come to the Castle? We’ve had a…situation.”

“But wouldn’t it be faster if Twilight flew to Orange Ocean?”

“Yeah, no. I’m going out there and saving my brother first and foremost.”

“I wouldn’t fight her on this one, Your Majesty. She seems pretty set.”

“But-”

Twilight huffed and stamped her hoof down. Was she being a bit irrational? Yes, she absolutely was the best choice to fly down to Orange Ocean to let the Meta-Knights–and Sunset, who had gone down there just yesterday to speak with Meta Knight about the book she’d found–know what was going on. But she felt like she was owed just a bit of irrationality, and besides. Her brother was out there, somewhere, and a foreign entity was doing who-knew-what with his body! She needed to get out there and help him!

Plus, focusing on that goal was helping her recover from that wave of intense apathy that had hit her–and the rest of the Castle–a few minutes ago.

The room they were in–the castle’s antechamber–was a buzz of activity at this point. The ruckus had woken up basically the entire castle, and they were using this spot to work out a plan. It helped that they could head out as soon as they decided on one.

“I’m going out there to find Spike, and that’s final,” Twilight insisted.

The Waddle Dee guard that had been backing her up nodded in agreement.

Dedede sighed, conceding. “Alright, fine. I guess if we have to get the Meta-Knights involved, we’ll do it the slow way.” He pointed to a random member of his staff in the room, a Broom Hatter. “You, head out to Orange Ocean and tell ‘em what’s going on.”

The Broom Hatter jolted up in surprise, nearly dropping his broom.

“That’s an order!” Dedede reminded.

The Broom Hatter gave a salute and ran off.

Twilight nodded and took a bite of the apple she had on her. It wasn’t much, but it was breakfast, and it had healed the wound she’d sustained earlier that morning. It was absolutely massive, too, nearly the size of her head.

It still wasn’t better than Sweet Apple Acre’s apples, but then again, Twilight doubted that any other apple could compete with those.

Bandana Dee sprinted in through the open doors. “We came as fast as we could!” he called, Kirby and a creature that Twilight had never seen before entering after him.

She resisted the urge to ask what it was. She had more pressing matters to worry about, after all.

Dedede didn’t, though. “Hey, what’s that?”

“Gooey!” Kirby excitedly declared. “New friend!”

Impatiently, Twilight fluffed her wings. “Alright, now that we’re all here, we can head out and find Spike!”

She launched outside without waiting for an answer, the others not far behind. Immediately, she started casting scrying spells, starting with Spike’s last known location. There was a bit of residue left on the ground from when he burned through that beam, which meant that hopefully she could find where he had went and-

The spell fizzled out as soon as it hit the small splotch of darkness.

Twilight sat down hard, on the verge of panicking. She would find Spike, she had to. This was just…a setback. A major one, but one she would overcome, she reminded herself.

Just barely avoiding falling into despair, she was relieved when a new voice spoke up. “Sir!” Captain Montoya, a blade knight and third in line in Dedede’s military command, shouted as he crested the mountaintop. “We’ve received a report from the village! A dragon was sighted early this morning heading south!”

Dedede frowned as Twilight suddenly perked up. “South?” she asked.

Bandee’s eyes widened. “He must’ve been going after the Rainbow Bridges!”

“Rainbow Bridges?” Twilight asked.

“They connect the Rainbow Islands,” Dedede unhelpfully explained.

At Twilight’s confused look, Bandana Dee chipped in again. “They also channel most of Popstar’s ambient emotion magic.”

Twilight frowned. “Emotion magic? I know harmony magic–that’s my native unicorn magic–is based mostly on emotion.” She gasped. “Maybe that’s why the Element of Magic almost pushed whatever was possessing Spike out of him, and why it protected me!”

“But if that thing is going after something that can channel emotion magic…” Bandee trailed off.

Everyone had a moment where the severity of the situation sunk in. No one really knew exactly what this parasite was capable of, but if emotion magic repelled it and it was actively seeking to subvert that…

“We need to act quickly,” Twilight decided. She spread her wings and launched upward, but very quickly came back down. “Um…which way are the Rainbow Islands?”

Dedede chuckled. He started down the mountain, gesturing for everyone else to follow. “C’mon, I’ll lead the way.”

Author's Note

Spike, the Possessed Dragon
Spike's been possessed by an alien entity! It doesn't have a lot of tools in his body, but watch out! It can get creative! It doesn't seem to like the Element of Magic much, though.

I know this fight isn't much of a proper boss, given that it's practically just a cutscene, but I felt like it deserved a pause screen description.

You may notice that Dark Matter is a bit...different here than in canon. Not terribly so, but there are some inconsistencies that come up when you try to divide emotions into "positive" and "negative" variations. So I decided to cut the knot and just have the Darkness seeking to destroy emotions in general (though the more "negative" an emotion is the more likely it is to be fueled by basic instincts, so they can handle those a bit better than traditionally "positive" ones). They're creatures of apathy that exist solely to travel planet to planet and wipe out anything that could oppose the Darkness. Why that is the case is something that will be revealed later on.

The Dark Matter Trilogy never did give us any characterization on them, and I do ever so love taking established lore and expanding upon it. Though as I'm writing this author's note, I am realizing that I might be pulling a bit of inspiration from the Borg, but hey, who doesn't love a good magical Borg-archetype?

Chapter XXVI: Yellowed Grass

Reaching the southern shore of Dreamland only took the group around half an hour or so. Once Dedede had gotten them out of the forests around the base of Mount Dedede and pointed Twilight in the direction of the Rainbow Islands, they were off in a single teleport all the way to the shore.

The alicorn was panting a bit when they blipped back into existence. Anxious as she was to get Spike back–somehow, she hadn’t quite worked out that part of the plan yet–she’d forgotten that teleporting so many people could be so draining. Though even accounting for that, it took a bit more out of her than she had been expecting.

“Are you alright?” Bandee asked.

Twilight took a deep breath. “Yes, I’m fine. I just need a second.” She stared out over the water while she recovered. There was an island visible out there, almost a kilometer away. “Is this where the Rainbow Bridge is supposed to be?”

“Yeah, but…” Bandee trailed off. “How’re we gonna get over there?”

The island was surrounded by mostly sheer cliffs, so even putting aside the distance, swimming to it didn’t seem to be an option. Twilight could potentially teleport them all again, but she didn’t want to cause too much undue strain on her magic, especially not this early. She might very well need it for purging whatever had possessed Spike.

Fidgeting a bit, she adjusted the tiara on her head, making sure that the sticking charm was still in place. She wasn’t sure whether a single Element would be effective without the others, but it at least seemed like it had helped back at the castle.

“I could levitate everyone,” Twilight mentioned.

Dedede shrugged. “I mean, I’m pretty sure Bandana and Gooey here are just about the only ones who can’t at least hover.”

Gooey just maintained its dopey grin and levitated about a meter in the air, a slowly-rotating ring of orange spheres having sprouted from its back.

Everyone stared at him for a moment. “Bandana’s the only one here who can’t hover,” Dedede corrected.

Twilight looked at him incredulously.

“I can hover!” Dedede defended, a scandalized tone to his voice. “I just don’t have a reason to often!”

Kirby nodded.

Twilight still seemed disbelieving. “I’m sorry, how?”

Dedede grinned. “Like this!”

The penguin inhaled far more air than Twilight thought would be possible, inflating to almost twice his usual size. He flapped his arms and slowly, but visibly, the ballooned king rose into the air. “See?” Dedede said, immediately falling to the ground as speaking let out the trapped air in his body.

Twilight made a strangled sort of noise as her brain struggled to come up with a rational explanation for what was happening. “What? But-? That’s-? That’s not how lift works!” she complained.

Kirby looked confused and puffed up as well, demonstrating his own ability.

Dedede gestured vaguely in his direction.

“Listen, whatever Kirby’s doing has got to have some sort of magic behind it,” Twilight explained. “I haven’t figured it out yet, but it has to be there. You, on the other hoof, I haven’t seen use any sort of magic whatsoever.”

“Hammerspace!” Dedede countered.

Twilight blinked. “What?”

Dedede grabbed his hammer from nowhere and put it away again. “Hammerspace.”

Bandee facepalmed. “It’s not actually called hammerspace,” he assured. “His Majesty just calls it that because that’s where he keeps his hammer.”

She still fidgeted a bit at waiting longer, but Twilight’s curiosity got the best of her. “How does it work?”

Dedede laughed. “Hell if I know!”

She turned to Bandana.

He shrugged. “Every creature I’ve ever met that’s native to Popstar has been able to store things and retrieve them magically–it’s how I store my spear whenever I’m not holding it. I think it’s just part of how the planet works.”

Twilight sighed. “Alright, I can work this out later, I guess.” She shook her head. It was close enough to storage spells that she knew, anyway. Hay, even Spike could store things with his messenger flame, so who was to say that the denizens of Popstar couldn’t do that naturally. “We’ve got a mission, right now. Bandana Dee, do you mind being levitated across?”

A green-and-black flame flicked across a green gemstone for a moment before both vanished. The Darkness could feel the emotions of this world become even more muted, and thus it gained a slight bit more power. It gazed back out across the water, narrowing the dragon’s eyes as it saw four figures approaching the previous island. They staggered a bit as the wave of apathy hit them, but the situation was all too clear to the Darkness. It was being followed.

This would not do.

It gathered a ball of darkness in its claw and launched it at the island it had come from. Destroying the second bridge had granted it just enough power to do so, and when it landed on the other side it would seep into the local wildlife, sapping away any emotion other than rage. It wasn’t anywhere near as good as direct control, but with any luck, reducing the island’s inhabitants to their base instincts would slow down its pursuers terribly.

Its work done, the Darkness slipped into the trees. It held no illusions that its paltry tricks would stop its pursuers, of course. It would need to completely take out these rainbow-hued bridges before it got powerful enough for that. But it would buy it time, time enough to plan ahead and strategize on its way to the next bridge.

The owl that it could see in the canopy above it could do quite well if its pursuers got to this island.

As soon as the group landed on the island, they could tell that something felt subtly…wrong. It wasn’t anything about the landscape itself, that all seemed fine. The island was covered in a grassy plain, with a large lake on the opposite side. A river flowed out of it and away from them, disappearing from view in a small copse of trees. Twilight figured that it probably terminated in a waterfall, plunging over the island’s cliffs and into the ocean below.

The grass was a bit yellow, but Twilight couldn’t quite tell if that was its natural state or if it was just the dry season; vegetation on this planet was a bit weird. It wasn’t terribly hot, but she was starting to feel the lack of shade. As they touched down and Twilight levitated Bandee to the ground, she could feel a few beads of sweat from both the exertion and the summer heat.

She looked around, searching for whatever that off-putting feeling was. “What’s this island called?”

“Grass Land, I think,” Bandee provided. “Bit of a boring name, I know.”

Finally, Twilight’s mind landed on what she thought was so unsettling. “Is it usually this…quiet?”

She wasn’t exactly prone to going out into nature, but being friends with Fluttershy had led to the inevitability every now and again. Wherever wildlife could flourish, there was almost always sound. Be it the chirping of birds, small animals skittering around in the grass, or any other of the large collection of sounds that animals could make. But here, there was…nothing. No birdsong, no chittering, just the slight rustling of grass in the breeze.

“I don’t think it’s supposed to be,” Bandee said.

Dedede frowned. “Something’s wrong,” he stated the obvious.

Twilight took a step forward. Slowly, the rest of the group followed, and they began making their way across the island. “Where exactly are we going?” Twilight eventually asked.

“To the next Rainbow Bridge,” Bandee replied. “Or at least, where it should be if it’s destroyed another. We all felt that second wave of just…apathy, right?”

Twilight and Dedede nodded, though Kirby looked faintly confused and Gooey seemed distracted by some of the grass rustling in an unusual manner.

Twilight blinked. The grass was moving opposite the wind. Slowly, they began to move towards it, hopeful that there was something else on this island.

The grass was tall, reaching most of the way up her legs. Some of it had gone to seed, too, and her nose scrunched up. Apparently there was quite a bit of pollen in the air as well. Looking off to the side, she let out a sneeze.

Almost immediately, another sound finally rang out. Were it not for what said sound was, Twilight would’ve been relieved to finally have heard proof that there was some sort of animal life on the island.

Unfortunately, the sound was a rattle.

Everyone froze. The rattling stopped for a moment, but then picked up again, closer this time. There was a tense moment of silence before the grass close to Twilight moved, and she acted on instinct.

Her horn flared and she caught something in the grass in her telekinesis. Gulping, she slowly–and carefully–lifted it out of the grass. A rattlesnake hovered in her telekinetic grip, outstretched to strike and its fangs not more than two centimeters from Twilight’s leg, its venom already dripping from its grooved teeth.

Then quite a lot of things happened at once.

Her ophidiophobia kicking in, Twilight screamed and threw the snake, not particularly caring where it landed, before she launched into the air so fast that the grass around her blew in all directions. A swarm of flying insects launched out of the grass after her, and part of her registered that they were wasps. Her wings reacted before her brain really caught up to that fact, though, and she was already fleeing.

Down on the ground, the others were dealing with the sudden influx of ground-bound animal life that was assaulting them. Bandee was taking some of the worst of it, being short enough for the grass to almost entirely come up around him. A number of rodents and other assorted small mammals swarmed him. Quickly, he summoned his spear and batted away those that had gotten close to him, taking care not to hit any with the actual spearhead. He hadn’t been to the Rainbow Islands in a long time, and judging whether a species here was sapient or not was always iffy. He wasn’t willing to take the chance.

The copperhead that lunged out of the grass at him was a bit more of a problem, though. He was already in the process of batting away a particularly large rat, and had no time to bring his spear up to defend himself.

Thankfully, it never actually reached him. As it was lunging, Gooey interposed itself between them. It didn’t seem to be out of any attempt at heroism, though–Kirby’s new friend looked to be more curious than anything. Bandee tried to rush forward and prevent the snake from actually biting, but was too late. The copperhead bit down on Gooey, sinking its fangs into the blob’s body.

Gooey just shook it off.

The snake fell to the ground, stunned, as the blue blob stared at it. It didn’t even seem all that hurt–Bandee couldn’t even see any bite marks on Gooey’s body! More than anything, Gooey just looked mildly inconvenienced. It extended its long tongue, wrapped it around the snake, and threw it quite a ways.

Granted a slight reprieve, Bandee blinked. “Uh…thanks?”

Gooey just maintained its grin and bounced towards Kirby while Bandee turned his attention to his king.

Dedede was having a bit of a rough time. He was being assaulted by the larger animals around, which, given the general fauna of the area, might not have seemed like much. Badgers, after all, weren’t particularly large. But several of them attacking at once could be vicious. The King of Dreamland was doing his best, but even with his hammer he couldn’t sustain a fight against so many opponents darting in and out of his defenses.

Bandana Dee rushed forward, spear in hand, to defend his sovereign. Dedede slammed his hammer down as he approached, launching two of the badgers attacking him Bandee’s way. The loyal Waddle Dee hit the both of them with his spear, knocking both unconscious and out of the way.

“Any idea what’s going on?” he asked, jumping up and grabbing ahold of the back of Dedede’s robe with one hand and holding his spear in the other.

Dedede just grunted and slammed his hammer down again, launching a pair of prairie dogs into the middle distance. A large ferret tried to attack from behind, but Bandee’s position prevented that possibility well enough. “I’ve got no clue!” Dedede bemoaned.

Bandee felt his king suddenly shift as he hit something else. Instead of another of the island’s wide assortment of wild animals, though, this was something else: a fireball of sorts. It hit the dry grass after Dedede batted it away, igniting the plants with a whoosh of flame. Bandana Dee scrambled up to Dedede’s shoulder to get a better look at what had launched it, though what he saw only contributed to further confusion.

The perpetrator looked like it was a giant hamster, given that the animal spat out another glob of something on fire as they turned to look. It was a solid meter tall, towering over Kirby, who was darting in and out of combat with it in some fireballs of his own. Bandee figured that he must’ve inhaled one of the hamster’s attacks at some point.

As they watched, the hamster dodged one of Kirby’s charges by digging itself underground. Kirby uncertainly looked around for a bit, before suddenly dodging to the side as the hamster burst out from the ground directly underneath him. There was a tense moment as the two combatants looked at each other, before Kirby cloaked himself in fire and rocketed into the hamster. The larger animal flew back a ways, rolling into a ball and covering itself in a rocky outer shell as it did. It skidded on the ground a few times before slowing to a stop and uncurling itself, seemingly eager to continue the fight.

Then Gooey landed on top of it, and it pitched forward before faceplanting.

There was the pitter-patter of quite a few small things hitting the ground as the wasps chasing Twilight all fell out of the sky. She landed herself a few moments later, the soft breeze carrying away the cold air left around her horn from the cooling charm she’d used. “Is everyone alright?” she asked.

Bandee and Dedede looked around, noting the lack of wildlife attacking them. “I think so…?” Bandana wagered.

Kirby and Gooey were more distracted by the giant hamster, who itself was waking up. The former gave it a pleasant wave as the latter happily bounced a bit. The hamster seemed a bit dazed as it picked itself up, but that faded quickly.

“Oi, mates, thanks for that one,” it said, and Twilight physically recoiled in confusion. “I don’t know what came over me there, but you got my mind out of a right bind!” It chuckled. “The name’s Rick, by the by.”

Twilight’s brain took a moment to reboot. “That’s a giant talking hamster,” she eventually dumbly said.

Rick coughed, a few embers spilling from his mouth. “Well, I’ve been talkin’ long as I can remember!”

“A giant, talking, fire-breathing hamster,” Twilight amended.

Dedede laughed. “Yeah, and you said that penguins don’t talk from where you’re from, either.” He twirled his hammer. “But here I am!”

“You do look significantly different from penguins in Equestria,” Twilight countered. “He looks just like-” she cut herself off, shaking her head. “Sorry, it’s a bit rude of me to talk about you like you’re not here.” She trotted forward, offering a hoof to shake. “I’m Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria.”

Rick enthusiastically grabbed her hoof in a paw and shook. “Pleased to meetcha, Your Highness,” he said. “Dontcha worry ‘bout seemin’ rude; I know a lotta the shit we got here on Grass Land is confusing to Popstarians.”

“I’m not from Popstar,” Twilight objected, but Rick had already rolled away from her and towards Dedede.

“I think I’ve seen you two around, but I never did pop over to get your names,” he said.

Dedede twirled his hammer again and postured. “I’m King Dedede!” he proudly declared. He reached up to his shoulder and plucked Bandee off of it. “And this here is my top General: Bandana Waddle Dee!”

“Call me Bandee; it’s shorter,” Bandee cut in.

“Righto, little buddy,” Rick responded. He curled back up into a rocky-coated ball and rolled back over to Kirby and Gooey. “And what ‘bout the good blokes here that got my mind back on track?”

“Kirby!” Kirby happily replied, gesturing to himself. “And Gooey!” he pointed to Gooey.

Rick smiled broadly. “Well thanks again for helpin’ me out, there!” He looked back at Twilight, who had a prominent frown on her face. “You alright there, Princess?”

That seemed to jolt Twilight out of whatever thought she’d gotten lost in. “Oh, yes, I’m fine,” she answered. “I was just thinking about the differences between the wildlife on the rest of Popstar and what we’ve seen here. Hay, if you couldn’t talk or breathe fire, I could be convinced that you were just a really big hamster from Equestria.”

Dedede frowned. “Where’re you going wit’ that?”

“What if the wildlife on Grass Land isn’t from Popstar, strictly speaking?” Twilight asked in a hopeful voice. “It’s extremely similar to wildlife we have back in Equestria, so maybe there’s some sort of connection?”

“You think it might be a way for you to get back home?” Bandee asked.

Twilight shrugged. “Maybe. But it’s worth looking into–I’ll tell Sunset about it after we save Spike.” She whirled around and started moving in the same direction they had been before the scuffle–towards the copse of trees. “Let’s get to the next Rainbow Bridge.”

The rest of the group caught up to her as she was beginning to trudge through the grass that hadn’t been flattened or burned by the fight. Rick joining them caught all of their attentions, though, as he rolled up and uncoiled. “You lot are headin’ over to Big Forest, then?”

Twilight involuntarily snorted at the absurdity of the name, but no one really noticed, given that it happened at the same time as Bandee’s answer. “Probably. Someone’s possessed Twilight’s little brother and is destroying the Rainbow Bridges.” A determined look came over his face as he shifted his spear a bit. “We’re going to stop them.”

“Well, I hope you don’t mind me comin’ along, then,” Rick declared. “Whispy’s taken up hangin’ about on Grass Land, an’ if whatever got me so angry got him too, we could be in for a world o’ hurt.”

Twilight stopped short. “Isn’t Whispy Woods a…tree?”

“Yep!” Kirby answered from ahead of them.

“And wasn’t he on the mainland?”

“Yeah, he does that sometimes,” Bandee said. “I don’t know how either.”

Discord’s popcorn squished loudly as he chewed and Cadance and Shining stared at the screen. Cadance seemed a bit surprised–though only slightly–at the events immediately escalating. She had, after all, attended her own wedding, so she knew that Twilight could fight if she needed to. She had never seen Twilight willing to fight with such ferocity, though, even if all she’d actually done during that scuffle was throw a snake and freeze some wasps.

Her husband was a bit more critical, though.

“The cooling charm was a good idea, but Twily panicking from the rattlesnake seems like it actively hindered her,” he noted. “I know she would’ve thought of that earlier if she hadn't panicked. But hey, at least it was wasps and not ladybugs.”

Discord leaned over curiously, an eyebrow raised. “Dear little Twiggles has a fear of…ladybugs?”

“I never really got that one,” Cadance admitted. “Twilight never wanted to talk about why she’s afraid of ladybugs, though, so I never pried.”

Shining waved his hoof a bit. “She had an infestation in her room when she was six or so. It…didn’t end well.”

Discord stroked his beard while humming contemplatively.

Shining, who had caught on, growled at him. “And you better not have any ideas.”

Discord gasped dramatically and placed a paw on his chest. “Moi? Prey upon a pony’s deepest fears and insecurities for my own personal amusement? Why, I would never.”

Both Cadance and Shining gave him an incredulous look, and the former eventually spoke up. “You know, I think I can make time to have a discussion with Fluttershy after this…”

“Message recieved, shutting up now.”

There was a great cacophony as the filing cabinet tipped over and Twilight’s friends all tumbled out of it and onto Discord’s living room floor. “Rares, I think yer horn’s pokin’ me in the ribs!”

“I’m terribly sorry, Applejack, but I can’t exactly move with Rainbow on top of me!”

“Yeah, well, Pinkie’s standing on my wing!”

“Laying,” Pinkie corrected with a wheeze. “And I think one of my hooves landed on AJ’s hat. Discord’s pretty funny, but he’s got a weird sense of humor sometimes.”

“I’m right here, you know!” Discord complained from across the room.

Everypony ignored him.

The filing cabinet shuddered a bit as Fluttershy forced her way out of it and noticed the pile of ponies. “Oh no, I’m so sorry, I should’ve thought that something like this would happen if everypony went through at once, I should’ve warned you-”

“Fluttershy, darling, you are fine,” Rarity assured as the pile disengaged itself. She gave a pointed glare to Discord afterward, who whistled innocently.

“So,” Rainbow yawned, “what’d we miss?”

“Well, the talking hamster, for one,” Discord said, and Fluttershy rushed over with a gasp, planting herself right next to Discord on the couch and staring at Rick on the screen.

“Yes, and I heard that poor Spikey-Wikey got…” Rarity made a scrunched-up sort of face, “possessed?”

Discord solemnly nodded. “A horrible condition, I know, but dealing with mind-altering aliens is never fun.”

Rainbow suddenly perked up. “Aliens?”

“Discord, do you still have that second screen you were using?” Cadance asked.

Wordlessly, Discord gestured and swapped the views between his smaller tablet and the big screen, handing off the smaller one to Fluttershy. Spike–or Spike’s body, at least–was crossing another of the Rainbow Bridges. This one, just like the others, drained of its color and disintegrated away in the wind, the last bits of it coalescing into a blue gem.

As Spike’s green-and-black flame blew over it, Applejack squinted at the screen. “Ah ain’t sure if it’s just me, but did Spike there just get a bit…taller?”

Rarity’s ears fell back as she took a seat of her own. “Oh…oh dear.”

For a moment, Twilight felt hopeless out of nowhere. The weight of the world was pressing down on her, and she actively stumbled as, for a brief moment, she wondered what the point of it all was.

She shook herself out of it in mere moments, though. Clearly whatever had taken Spike had just destroyed another Bridge.

“So, I don’t think I’ve actually met Whispy, yet,” Twilight mentioned as they started moving again, mostly to start some conversation and counteract the apathetic feeling they’d all felt. They’d entered the trees proper, now, and thankfully the grass was far shorter here, choked out by the general underbrush. The grass outside had mostly gone to seed, so by the time they’d gotten to the trees Twilight’s eyes had been watering. “What’s he like, usually?”

“Normally he’s pretty nice,” Bandee replied. “But he does get kinda snippy around allergy season, so if whatever happened to Rick happened to him…” he trailed off.

“Yeah, an’ I was a right blighter like that,” Rick pitched in. “Just felt kinda mad at everythin’.”

Twilight blinked in realization. “Whispy’s a tree.”

“Yeah, and?” Dedede asked.

“How does he have allergies?”

“Well he’s gotta have an immune system, don’t he?”

There was a titanic sound, and everything around them shook. Leaves scattered from the trees’ canopies, and one in particular a ways down shook dramatically. Birds took to the air in droves as the arboreal mass shook back and forth, a few giant apples and a Gordo clanging to the ground.

The sound, of course, was one, very distinctive word, for a certain definition of the term.

“ACHOO!”

The ground shifted and roiled as the sapient tree’s roots moved beneath it, one great wooden appendage emerging and rubbing a mask that was secured around its trunk. Above the mask was a giant pair of glasses, so Twilight figured that the mask must’ve been covering whatever passed for a nose and mouth on a tree.

It, strangely, wasn’t quite as surreal as she expected it to feel. Probably because she’d been around to see Applejack read a story to Bloomberg.

Still, she was a bit wary of the giant apple tree in front of them. Whispy seemed to be in a bit of an irritable state as it was, and she wasn’t quite sure how the general apathy that was going around would affect him.

Kirby, of course, didn’t care, and waltzed right up to him with a happy wave and a drawn-out “Hi!”

Whispy visibly slumped and began grumbling something under his breath. Twilight couldn’t quite hear the beginning of his rant, obscured as it was by the mask, but it was gradually increasing in volume.

“...can’t even be bothered to leave me the hell alone.” He snorted in exasperation, a strange sound to come from a tree. “No, I’m done with this. Begone.”

Suddenly, the ground around Twilight erupted. Roots–extremely sharp roots, in fact–burst from the ground on either side of her, and she barely had time to register what was happening as they stabbed out at her. Hastily, she threw up a shield. The roots slammed into it full-force, ricocheting off of the magical construct but making Twilight wince nonetheless.

Whispy didn’t slow down, though, quickly switching targets to Dedede and Bandee. Two more roots speared towards them, and the King quickly grabbed his hammer out of nowhere and slammed it into the root that was after him. That wasn’t enough to deter it, though, and it had only slowed it down by a second or so. But that was enough for Dedede’s hammer to at least partially transform as a jet of blue flame shot out one of its faces. Dedede did a full twirl to build up momentum, and the hammer slammed into Whispy’s root with enough force to shatter its tip.

Whispy roared in pain, but Bandee didn’t have time to consider that as he danced around the root aiming for him. He didn’t have nearly the force behind his attacks that Dedede had, so he had to get a bit more creative. Slamming the tip of his spear into the ground, he vaulted above the root’s next strike, landing on top of it with his spear still in hand.

“Whispy Woods!” he shouted, running down the length of the root towards Whispy himself. “As your commanding officer, I order you to stand down!”

Whispy didn’t verbally reply, instead just jolting his root up a bit and sending Bandee flying into his canopy.

The others hadn’t been idle while this was going on, though. Rick had curled into a stony ball and launched forwards, aiming to hit Whispy right in the glasses. The tree countered that, though, by simply whacking him out of the air with a root. That kept him from fully focusing on Kirby and Gooey, however, who each got a good hit in–Kirby with a fireball and Gooey with a dark laser of sorts.

Twilight didn’t know how the physics of a laser that actively darkened the area around it worked, but she had other things to worry about at the moment.

Like Whispy’s attention turning back to her. But she was ready for it, this time. When he launched more roots at her–three, this go around–she flared her horn and caught them in her telekinesis. With a grunt of effort and a bead of sweat running down her forehead, she focused her magic and performed a basic transmutation spell to soften the material. It wasn’t anything spectacular, and the only thing that made it strenuous was the scale, but it was enough to allow her to tie Whispy’s roots together, rendering those ones unusable.

He just responded by shaking himself a bit, though, and a dazed Bandana Waddle Dee fell out of his canopy and onto Twilight’s back. “Look out!” Bandee shouted.

Twilight didn’t ask why, she just jumped out of the way. Right on her previous position, a rather large Gordo hit the ground with a thud.

There was a second series of loud thuds closer to Whispy’s trunk, as multiple other Gordos landed right in front of Kirby as he was preparing to charge again. The pink puffball slowed down enough to avoid stabbing himself on their spikes, but that gave Whispy enough time to slam another root into him, launching him a ways away and forcing his fire ability out of him.

It was the first time that Twilight had actually seen Kirby lose a copy ability up close. Bandee and Sunset had fully briefed her on how Kirby’s copy ability worked, or at least as much as they knew about it, anyway, but she hadn’t had the chance to properly see it in action. Well, except from a kilometer away and enraged enough to blow up a mountaintop, so she hadn’t really had the chance to see it in action in a situation that she could actually analyze it.

He didn’t stay without a copy ability for long, though. Whispy had attempted to drop another Gordo on him as he landed, but Kirby deftly dodged out of the way and sucked up some of the leaves that had fallen with it. From it, he gained a bright green hat made of leaves, with an emerald-hued gem at its center. He waved his arm and summoned a leaf, staring at it curiously for a moment.

Whispy tried to catch him off guard as he was learning about the new ability, but Kirby waved his other arm and summoned a whole storm of leaves, sharp enough to slice straight through the new root that Whispy was stabbing at him with. The tree physically recoiled, and everyone realized that this was their chance.

Bandee, still on Twilight’s back, brandished his spear. “CHARGE!”

Twilight took to the air, Bandee wobbling dangerously on her back, and she fired a magical laser at Whispy at the same time that Gooey fired a laser of its own. They hit at around the same time as well, hers cracking Whispy’s glasses and Gooey’s slicing one of the strings on his mask. Rick, Dedede, and Kirby struck at the same time too, Rick shooting some fire on his way out for that little bit of extra sting, Dedede just whaling on him, and Kirby riding forward on a cyclone of leaves that had Whispy crying out in pain.

As a final strike, Bandee jumped off of Twilight’s back and speared downward, slicing off the last of the fabric holding Whispy’s mask in place as Gooey bodily slammed into him, which also shattered his glasses.

Immediately, Whispy began coughing extremely loudly, but he himself seemed relatively subdued. Most everyone backed off, but Kirby walked up and consolingly patted his trunk as the tree hacked up a nonexistent lung.

“Oh stars above, why?” Whispy wailed between coughs. “Why must hay fever exist?”

“Hey, Twilight, you able to do anything about that with that fancy magic of yours, maybe?” Dedede whispered.

Twilight, her horn still lit from the battle, telekinetically grabbed the remains of Whispy’s mask and joined them back together. “Just to be clear,” she loudly asked, getting the tree’s attention, “you’re not going to continue attacking us?”

“Oh, goodness-” he coughed, “-no, I don’t know what came over me there! I just felt so angry and lashed out!”

“Same thing happened to me, mate!” Rick called. “Don’t beat yourself up ‘bout it, it seems to be goin’ around.”

Whispy sighed in relief as he secured his mask back onto his face. “I just have to thank you all for saving me from whatever affliction affected me there! Why, I feel downright horrible!” He gasped upon fully noticing who was among them. “General Dee! Your Majesty! Please accept my humblest apologies!”

Dedede dismissively waved a flipper. “Eh, like the hamster said, dontcha worry about it. Whatever’s going on has hit more than just you.”

“Something’s possessed my little brother and is destroying the Rainbow Bridges,” Twilight explained. “We’ve been trying to catch up to it.”

Whispy, in a motion that Twilight personally found to be incredibly strange for a tree to perform, twisted himself around to look out over the water. “My word!” he exclaimed. “The Bridge is gone!”

Rick rolled up to the cliff face, staring down at the water as a wave crashed against the rock. “Crikey! Even the bloody ocean seems pissed off!”

True enough, the ocean’s surface was churning, and another wave loudly slammed into the cliff–overpowering the sound of the nearby waterfall, even–as a particularly strong salty breeze blew past them. Twilight’s nose scrunched up. That wasn’t just salt–it smelled like there was ozone in there as well. Squinting, she cast a farsight spell and looked at the sky quite a ways away. Just barely poking up over the horizon was a mountaintop, almost entirely obscured by steadily-darkening clouds.

“There’s a storm rolling in,” Twilight said. “We should get moving as soon as possible.”

“Allow me,” Whispy’s voice spoke up, and the ground rumbled for a moment before the cliff face below them split open and his roots shot out of it. He seemed to be actively straining himself, if his expression was anything to go by, but soon enough the makeshift bridge had reached all the way to the next island, which was as similarly cliffed as Grass Land, but completely covered in a forest.

“I can’t keep this up for long, but you should be able to get to Big Forest on my roots,” Whispy said. “Consider it an apology.”

Twilight was considering telling him that she could just levitate them across, but decided against it. This was faster, anyway. “Thank you!”

The group stepped out onto the bridge and began the long walk to Big Forest.

Author's Note

Rick, the Enraged Hamster

Rick the Hamster, normally a perfectly pleasant resident of Grass Land, has been corrupted by something! If you can defeat him, maybe he'll come back to his senses!

Whispy Woods, the Corrupted Tree

Oh no! Whatever corrupted Rick got Whispy as well! But he has allergies, so focus your attacks and Kirby and friends will take him down!

And here we are, into the Dark Matter Trilogy proper. I've been looking forward to these chapters for a long time, and we're just at the beginning of the first arc in the trilogy. Writing this is gonna be fun. But for now, we've got the next steps to look forward to in chapter twenty-seven: Trees of Green.

Chapter XXVII: Trees of Green

“Y’know, Ah’m startin’ ta feel pretty bad for the trees ‘round there,” Applejack bemoaned as Twilight and her posse made their way across the water. “First it was those ones up in the Floria place, an’ now even the apple trees are takin’ a beatin’!”

Cadance took a sip of her coffee. “So this isn’t the first time you’ve seen them encounter sapient trees?”

“Last time there were two!” Rainbow provided.

“Though it wasn’t any of the…creatures?” Rarity considered. “I’m not entirely sure what else to refer to them as, but it seems somehow insulting to their general intelligence.”

Discord’s popcorn crunched. “‘People’ is the generally accepted term, from what I know.”

Rarity nodded. “It wasn’t any of the people down there today; Sunset was the one who ran into the two trees on Floria.”

Shining nodded in understanding. “I presume she took to using her fire to attack?”

“Eyup,” Applejack affirmed. “Ah actually wanted ta ask, didya happen ta know Sunset? Ah don’t quite know if the timin’ adds up, but she was the Princess’s personal student.”

“She disappeared under a year into my tenure as Guard Captain,” Shining explained. “But we did spar once, though from my understanding Princess Celestia did not care for that happening.”

Cadance giggled. “Auntie Celestia can get really overprotective at times.” She poked Shining in the side. “Remember when we started dating?”

Shining scoffed and rolled his eyes. “How could I forget? She completely circumvented me in the chain of command and had multiple guards watching us at all times, and I think there were a few intelligence officers tailing us as well. Plus, I saw Mom and Dad watching us with binoculars on at least three separate rooftops.”

“Yer pretty good at the whole Guard thing, huh?” Applejack noted.

Cadance grinned and wrapped a foreleg around her husband. “Well, there’s a reason he was the youngest Guard Captain in two centuries!”

“Barely,” Shining countered. “I was twenty, but Captain Ironlock from fifty years ago was only a month older than I was when I was promoted.”

“Just let me gas you up on this one, dear.”

“Speaking of,” Fluttershy softly cut in. “Where is Sunset?”

Shining frowned. “I know that, before you all got here, Twily said something about her visiting someplace called Orange Ocean?”

“Oh, I think she went there to talk to Meta Knight about that book she found,” Discord elaborated, tossing more popcorn into his mouth.

Rarity furrowed her eyebrows. “I thought they were enemies?”

“My recording cut off before the explanation, but Meta Knight was acting in defense of the planet as a whole,” Discord explained, grinning at the confused expressions of most of the room. “They’ve made a whole defense league, even!”

Shining cleared his throat. “Does it have a name?”

Discord laughed. “They keep bringing up that it doesn’t have one, but never get around to naming it!”

Pinkie, who up until now had mostly been focused on the screen, turned her attention to Discord. “Hey, Discord?” she said. “Why do you keep going with popcorn for these things? Isn’t that kinda…” she smirked, “predictable?”

Discord offered her his bowl. “Check again, Miss Pie.”

Pinie blinked. “Are these…pretzels shaped like popcorn?”

“And they taste like marshmallows!” Discord added. “Would you like some?”

“Would I!”

She slammed her face into the bowl.

Whispy’s root bridge, thankfully, managed to last long enough for the makeshift group of adventurers to make their way to Big Forest. The final leg was a bit more difficult, with the apple tree’s roots thinning out the further they got, but it was entirely manageable.

They ran into another intense feeling of apathy as they stepped onto the island, though, and stumbled for a moment. It seemed like they’d gotten to the end of the bridge at just the right time, too, because immediately following the feeling, Whispy’s roots retracted. Twilight figured that the apathy had hit him, too.

She shook her head to clear it. She couldn’t lose hope, not now. Saving Spike was still her top priority.

Bandee grunted as he used his spear to prop himself up. “That’s four,” he said. “There’s only three Bridges left.”

Twilight narrowed her eyes. “What happens if it destroys all seven?”

Bandee shrugged. “Honestly, I have no idea.” He twirled his spear a bit, which Twilight was beginning to pick up on being a bit of a nervous habit of his. “I don’t think it would just immediately take away everyone’s emotions or something, but it would definitely make whatever took Spike a hell of a lot stronger.”

Twilight shuddered. That…thing that she’d fought back at the castle had still gotten away from her, and at this rate it was going to be in a far stronger form when they caught up to it.

She looked around and smiled a bit. This time, though, she wasn’t going in alone. “We’ll get through it,” she assured. “No matter what, we’ll save Spike.”

Kirby raised a leaf skyward with a grin and shouted what he must have aimed to be an inspiring “YAH!” before rushing into the underbrush, with Gooey not far behind.

Dedede blinked. “So uh, we going after him?”

“I’ve gotta wonder if the lil’ ankle biter even knows where he’s goin’” Rick added.

“Kirby really has a knack for running right towards the danger,” Bandee said as they got moving. “And also, I’ve been here before. That is the way towards where the next Rainbow Bridge should be.”

“I wanted to ask,” Twilight piped up, “why have you come here before?”

Bandana Dee gestured towards the King.

“Well y’see,” Dedede started, “there’s a couple of ancient castles ‘round these parts that I wanted to check out after I declared myself King.”

“He felt threatened by their presence,” Bandee stage whispered to Twilight.

That got a small giggle out of her.

Dedede pouted. “Hey, it was a legitimate concern! Who knows who else might declare themselves a ruler and threaten my claim to Dreamland!”

“Didya find any drongos out there when ya checked?” Rick asked.

Bandee made a good approximation of raising an eyebrow, especially given that he didn’t have any. “Well, they were uninhabited, and seem like they have been for a long time.”

“I’ve been kicking around renovating them, though,” Dedede added. “I’ve had some guys coming down every so often to restore the one over on Iceberg. Might be a good vacation spot.”

Rick laughed. “‘Course a penguin’d chose someplace like that for a vacay.”

“Come to think of it,” Twilight mentioned, “what is the geography of Popstar even like? Your library back at the castle was…” she mentally searched for the most appropriate word, “lacking.”

“Well,” Rick piped up, “ya’ve got seven o’ these Rainbow Islands: Grass Land, Big Forest, Ripple Field, Iceberg, Red Canyon, Cloudy Park, and the southernmost one is the Dark Castle.”

“And quite a ways further south of the Rainbow Islands are the Popopo Islands,” Bandee pitched in. “They’re tropical, and an excellent vacation spot!”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Wait, I want to focus on the statement before that. You literally call one of the islands ‘Dark Castle?’”

Rick shrugged. “It’s dark and it has a castle covering the entire island.”

Twilight was about to complain, before remembering that she lived in a town called Ponyville and was friends with an apple farmer named Applejack. She promptly decided that maybe on-the-nose naming conventions weren’t something worth mentioning and let the subject drop.

“‘Sides, that castle’s not got much in it,” Dedede added. “It’s way worse off than the one on Iceberg.”

“That’s fair enough, I suppose,” Twilight said. “Still-”

She cut herself off as the sound of a branch breaking hit her ears. She swiveled them forward and stopped entirely. “Did you all hear that?”

There were a series of nods, and Twilight looked around for the source. The conversation had distracted her earlier, but like on Grass Land, the area around them was eerily quiet. Unlike before, though, the local wildlife didn’t seem to be planning an ambush.

Above them, just below the canopy, sat a Bronto Burt. Twilight had initially thought, back when Bandee had originally been translating Dedede’s library for her, that the species would be similar to parasprites from her homeworld, but had quickly been proven wrong. They were relatively simple creatures, at least compared to the rest of Dreamland’s native population, and bore no malice. Usually they would be flying about, but this one seemed…peculiar.

It sat alone on the branch, seeming almost dejected. On a closer look, though Twilight found that it was less dejection and more boredom. It just didn’t seem to care about the world around it, even when she flew up and waved a hoof in front of its face.

The alicorn frowned. “Now what is going on…” she wondered aloud.

Before she could ponder it further, though, a shadow passed over her vision and her eyes widened. Hurriedly, she landed just as the large tree branch that had been flying at her would have hit her. Thankfully it passed right over her head, impacting the branch the Bronto Burt was sitting on with a sharp crack. They both fell to the ground, though Twilight caught the Popstarian creature in her telekinesis and set it on a different tree.

It didn’t seem to care enough to try and save itself from the fall.

“What in the world was that?” Dedede exclaimed.

“And where’d the blokes get off to?” Rick added.

A second shadow passed over them, and the group looked up to see a large, dark purple owl. The underside of its wings and the feathers on its belly were white, but the main thing that drew Twilight’s attention was its bright yellow talons. It was holding a cloth bag, which was squirming from movement inside of it.

Bandee took a step back and readied his spear. “I think we know where Kirby and Gooey got off to, now.”

Rick narrowed his eyes. “Crikey! That’s Coo! I almost didn’t recognize ‘im with his feathers bein’ darker!”

“You know him?” Twilight asked.

“He pops over to Grass Land every now and again,” Rick answered.

Before he could elaborate further, though, Coo screeched and dove at the group. As he swooped over them, he raised his wings and a stream of sharpened purple feathers shot out at them. The group immediately scattered, and the sharp objects thankfully all missed, though they did spear quite deeply into the dirt below them.

Coo attacked next with what looked almost like sharpened air, somehow. He waved the talon that wasn’t holding the cloth bag, sending a wave of some sort directly at Twilight, and following it up with a dive at her.

That was a mistake on his part, though. Twilight quickly summoned a shield midair to block the atmokinetic attack, successfully preventing it from reaching her. Then, with Coo close by, she grabbed him in her telekinesis.

Or at least, she tried to. It almost felt like her magical grasp just slid off of him, and while it could have been a trick of the light, she swore that she saw his feathers grow a shade darker as it did. But her magic was able to grab hold of the cloth bag in Coo’s talon, ripping it from his grasp and freeing the trapped Kirby and Gooey.

They tumbled to the ground, Kirby looking around for a moment before bouncing back up to his feet. He’d lost his leaf ability, which Twilight figured was the only reason that Coo was able to keep him in the bag that long in the first place. He looked back up at the owl with a steely–and frankly quite annoyed–expression, though Gooey simply maintained its dopey grin.

It was getting to be a bit disconcerting, if Twilight really took a moment to reflect on it.

But that was neither here nor there, at the moment. Kirby was already responding to Coo’s retaliatory strike, which was another douse of feathers. Of course, Kirby being Kirby, he ate the attack, gaining a pair of feathered wings of his own–a copy ability that Twilight distinctly remembered seeing him use back on the Halberd. He wasted no time taking off, rocketing towards Coo far faster than he could hover.

The owl attempted to retreat, but quickly found himself unable to ascend any further due to the forest’s thick canopy. To avoid getting rammed by Kirby, he swooped down underneath him. Unfortunately for Coo, this put him right in the line of fire of Dedede, who’d jumped up to his height. The penguin slammed his hammer down on the other bird, sending Coo crashing into the ground with a squawk. Twilight trotted up to him, focusing her telekinesis to make sure he actually stayed in her grip this time. She grunted at the uptick of effort as Coo squirmed, and her attention was diverted upward at the faint purple glow that was coming not from her horn, but from her Element.

Coo writhed as she approached, his feathers getting lighter the closer she got. His eyes, which Twilight had previously assumed to be naturally black, brightened to a chocolate brown. The owl gave a woozy blink, before he stopped struggling and coughed up a small mote of darkness.

The approximately spherical thing made of negative space was extremely small, no bigger than a marble. Even a meter or so away, Twilight could feel the magic around it. Or, perhaps more accurately, she could feel the lack of any discernible magic. Even Sombra’s dark magic, powered by hate and rage, had had a distinct feeling to it, just like all forms of magic that Twilight had encountered before. From this, however…

She felt nothing.

It did seem to have some modicum of self-preservation, though, as it immediately tried to flee the scene. It didn’t get far, only a few meters or so, before the Element of Magic–which at this point was acting entirely independently of Twilight’s input–fired a violet magical beam at it. Instantly, the piece of darkness was vaporized, though the ground where the beam hit was entirely untouched. There was no scream of pain or terror. One moment the thing that had possessed Coo was there, the next it was not.

The glow from her Element died down, and Twilight curiously disengaged the sticking charm to levitate it off of her head and get a closer look at it. Visually, though, nothing had changed, so she quickly popped the tiara back on and reapplied the charm just as Coo was getting to his talons.

He groaned and rubbed a temple with a wing. “Bloody hell, what hit me?”

There was a crash as Dedede landed back on the ground and twirled his weapon. “A hammer,” he provided.

“Should I just be getting used to the talking animals, now?” Twilight asked.

She was ignored.

“Well, thank you for beating the devil out of me, there,” Coo replied. He winced and did his best to rub his back. “Could’ve done without the bodily harm, though.”

“Kirby, mate?” Rick asked. “Couldya check ‘round here for any fruits?” He nodded at the owl. “Looks like Coo could do with a healin’.”

Kirby grinned, flapped his wings, and took off for the canopy.

“Well, chaps and chapesses,” Coo said, “do any of you have an explanation for what came over me?”

Twilight frowned. “Earlier today, something possessed my little brother, and we’ve been chasing it. But…” she trailed off for a moment, parsing her thoughts. “All it’s done before now is make people irrationally angry and apathetic, but you’re the first person other than Spike that it’s actively possessed.”

“Stars above,” Bandee breathed, “what if there’s more than one?”

Twilight shook her head. “The one that was possessing Coo here was really small, so I think it’s just a matter of it growing more powerful with every Bridge it destroys.”

Coo’s eyes widened. “It’s destroying the Rainbow Bridges?” He blinked. “Well, that explains the sudden apathetic feelings I’ve been getting.”

Everyone winced as yet another wave of apathy washed over them.

“That’s five,” Bandana Dee dejectedly said. “There’s only two Bridges left.”

Dedede sighed. “It’s gotten powerful enough to possess at a distance and now there’s creatures that don’t care enough to even move. What in the world are we supposed to do?”

Twilight took a deep breath and focused on saving Spike. “We press on,” she said. “Like Bandee said, there’s only two bridges left, so it quite literally can’t get much worse than it already is.”

“Oi, mate,” Rick said, “ya don’t wanna jinx it.”

“How do you stay so focused, anyway?” Dedede asked. “Does it have anything to do with the trinket you’re wearing?”

“The Element of Magic?” Twilight considered that for a moment. “It might help, seeing how it reacts to the thing that possessed Spike, but I don’t think it’s everything.” She reached up and tapped it with a hoof. “See, it’s not glowing right now.”

“So what is your secret, then?” Coo asked.

Twilight shrugged. “I’ve just been giving myself a goal to focus on. For me it’s saving my brother.”

Coo nodded. “By the by, I do believe that I am at a disadvantage. I do not know any of your names other than Rick’s.”

Twilight blinked. “Oh! I’m Princess Twilight of Equestria, but-”

Coo gasped. “Why, I didn’t realize that I was in the presence of royalty! If I wasn’t so injured I’d attempt a bow!”

Dedede cleared his throat, but before he could mention his own royal status, Kirby dropped out of the trees with seven oranges. “Food!” he excitedly declared.

Everyone grabbed one of the fruits and ate their fill. Satisfied and feeling much better about the state of things, they began trekking forward again. Though as Coo took to the air to fly alongside Kirby, Twilight gave a forlorn sigh.

“You alright?” Bandee asked her.

“Yeah, I’m just…” she trailed off. “Thinking about home. I have a pet owl back there. I wonder how he’s doing.”

“Sunburst!”

“Yeah, Starlight?”

“Twilight’s demon owl left a dead mouse on the floor again!”

“You know, I’m starting to think that Owlowiscious doesn’t like us very much.”

“Who?”

“You, you featherbrained waste of space!”

“Who?”

“I just said y–Celestia damn it to Tartarus.”

There was a suppressed chuckle.

“You aren’t helping, Sunburst.”

Owls couldn’t grin, or even look smug in the first place, but Owlowiscious definitely looked like he was trying his hardest to do both.

The rest of their trek through Big Forest, although taking another quarter hour or so, passed without much event. It seemed like their enemy had banked on just possessing Coo for this island, and most of the rest of the wildlife didn’t care enough to engage. It might’ve been easier than their fight through Grass Land, but Twilight wasn’t sure if she preferred the eerie silence it resulted in.

Rick had attempted to make some small talk at one point, but no one was really feeling it anymore.

At some point, though, the monotony of trees was broken up as they entered a clearing. On the opposite side of it from the group was a massive tree with a large hole in it. How the tree was still alive–or even if it was–Twilight was unsure. As she glanced around, she noted two other large trees bearing the same structure, but as intriguing as that was she was mostly focused on the first one. Or, more specifically, at the absolutely massive Nruff, a piglike creature, slumbering at its base.

Then Dedede entered the clearing.

“These gosh darned plants get everywhere!” he loudly complained, brushing a heap of sticks off of his robe.

“We are in a forest, Your Majesty,” Bandee unhelpfully replied.

The Nruff snorted and blinked its eyes open. With a start, it jolted its attention towards the group and let out a low growl. Nruffs were usually rather unthreatening creatures, but this one was far larger than most, standing tall enough to rival Dedede and probably weighing over twice as much. Its tusks were short, sharp, and trowel-shaped, meant to be used as digging tools to forage for food. But they could absolutely serve as daggers in a pinch.

The Nruff let out a massive, high-pitched squeal. From around the underbrush several smaller piglike creatures–Nellies, if Twilight was remembering correctly–ran into the clearing and turned towards the group. Nellies, while quite similar to Nruffs, were not the same species. They were smaller, faster, had shorter tusks, and were generally a more social species than Nruffs. Not that it seemed like this particular Nruff cared about the standard social relationships between species.

The Nruff squealed again, and the Nellies all charged.

Dedede’s hammer was swinging before the first Nelly even reached him. It came down directly in front of it, but it still ran directly into the hammer’s head and knocked itself out, and the second to reach him took the full force of his hammer’s swing. It was launched a considerable ways, landing somewhere back in the underbrush.

Kirby and Gooey both took to the air, out of the Nellies’ range. It seemed like they hoped to take them out with ranged attacks, but the sheer number of them was overwhelming. For every Nelly they knocked out or delayed–be it by Kirby with his feathers or by Gooey with its weird darkness laser–two more seemed to show up. Soon, they piled on top of each other to reach the two of them, and they were buried under a pile of furry pigs.

Rick and Coo weren’t faring much better. The hamster had rolled into a ball and gained a rocky sheen over his fur, making it effectively impenetrable to the Nellies. But instead they continually ran into him full-force, bouncing him around like a soccer ball. Coo, much like Kirby and Gooey, was trying to take potshots at the swarm of pigs. He was at least doing marginally better, flying high enough that the Nellies couldn’t reach him. Any time they tried to pile their way up there, he quickly destabilized the structure with one of his cutters, but his range was limiting him to low-power shots with his feathers otherwise. It wasn’t really doing much to thin the horde.

Twilight and Bandana Dee wound up performing the best against the Nellies after them. She had a rotating set of shields she was using to block the Nellies as they ran towards her, and any that got past those shields were quickly dispatched by Bandee. It was a bit strange that the pigs were running fast enough to knock themselves out, but as she’d seen on Grass Land, it seemed that whatever powers were at work here actively subverted a creature’s normal rational function.

At least with the amount of practical work she had been getting with her shields lately, Twilight had been refining hers to be almost as good as her brother’s. At least, she hoped so.

Shining frowned as five of the pig-things swarmed Twilight at once. Taking the three individual floating shields she’d been using, she expanded them and placed them sequentially. The pigs crashed through the first with quite a bit of effort and the second with considerably less, but thankfully knocked themselves out on the third.

“That was sloppy,” the former Guard Captain commented.

“Well it worked!” Rainbow protested.

“Barely,” Shining said. “She set up the three shields in the opposite order than she should’ve, since she was dedicated to using multiple at all.” He shrugged. “Personally, I find that dumping a bunch of power into one shield is easier, but that can have diminishing returns after a bit. But if you’re using multiple shields, you want the strongest one to be the innermost one.”

“That is the one that those pigs knocked themselves out on, is it not?” Rarity asked.

Shining shook his head. “I was paying attention to how much strain those shields breaking was putting on Twilight. She made the outermost one the strongest and just lucked out that they sustained enough damage to knock themselves out on the other two.”

“Hey,” Pinkie pointed out, “I just wanna say, you seem pretty calm about everything!” She tilted her head. “If we hadn’t seen Twilight take on the Halberd, we’d all be freaking out!”

Applejack cleared her throat and gestured to Fluttershy, who was sniffling into a handkerchief that Discord provided. “Those poor, poor little piggies…”

“Flutters always freaks out,” Rainbow retorted. “For, y’know, a Fluttershy definition of ‘freaking out.’”

“What exactly is the Halberd?” Cadance asked. “I know about the weapon, but I can just hear the capitalization there.”

“Oh, just the battleship that Twilight, Sunset, Kirby, and Bandee boarded and took down!” Pinkie cheerily stated.

Shining blinked. “I think I’ll want to see that recording later.” He shook his head and took a sip of his coffee. “Anyway, to answer your question, Miss Pie, you never knew Twily as a teen.”

Rick’s world was still spinning, but it finally felt like he was not. Uncoiling himself, he looked up at Dedede, who’d caught him in his off hand. “Thanks for that, mate,” he said. “Think I’ll avoid bein’ a stone for now.”

Dedede just grunted in reply, hammering another Nelly into unconsciousness. He looked like he could keep going, but the exhaustion was starting to be a bit visible. Frowning at that, Rick decided to step in.

The next Nelly that approached them found itself aflame. It squealed a bit before rushing into the underbrush, and a short while later a splash echoed out as it jumped into the ocean.

They were immediately swarmed by more Nellies, though, and neither Dedede nor Rick would be able to deal with all of the dozen that were attacking them. Just as they’d consigned themselves to taking some hits, the ground under the Nellies erupted.

Kirby, dressed in a fursuit, dug out of the ground and swiped at the Nelly nearest to him with a powerful set of claws. It squealed and ran off, and the puffball switched targets to the next.

“Ya seen that ability yet?” Rick asked Dedede.

“Nope.”

A ways over in the clearing, the Nelly pile on top of Gooey exploded as it fired four of its lasers at once, and Coo picked off the still-conscious ones from the pile from above. As Dedede hit the last of them with his hammer, he looked around to see that Twilight and Bandee had finished theirs off too.

He wiped some sweat from his brow. “Is that it?”

It was not it.

Everyone had forgotten about the Nruff in the chaos.

It roared and charged at Kirby, but he quickly burrowed into the ground before it reached him. Rick curled up and rolled away, but Dedede was hit by the full force of the charging boar, bodily launching him a solid five meters back into the underbrush.

“Your Majesty!” Bandana Dee shouted, rushing over to where his king had landed. “Are you alright?”

Dedede pushed himself back to his feet with a groan and took off his cap, a smattering of leaves falling out of it. “I’m fine,” he snapped. “Just a bit annoyed.”

The Nruff, meanwhile, disappeared into the hole of one of the trees. Twilight narrowed her eyes at it, but it didn’t come back out.

Then the ground behind her rumbled, and she barely turned around in time to shield an attack from the Nruff. It had reappeared out of the hole of one of the other trees, and the attack had caught her by surprise. Its dagger-like tusk dug into the shield, which cracked around it. It shattered soon after, but it had given Twilight just enough time to take to the air and fly away.

Then the Nruff disappeared into another hole, and they had to play the guessing game again.

This time, it appeared in such a way that it caught Rick by surprise, slamming him into another tree and running away again before they could retaliate.

Coo huffed from the air. “Such cowardly hit-and-run tactics. How uncouth.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “And us flying to stay out of range is…”

“Strategic, my dear,” Coo grinned. Twilight wasn’t sure how that was possible with a beak. “Do keep up.”

Clearly, though, they still needed a strategy to retaliate. If they kept going like this, their ground-bound allies would just keep taking hit after hit. Even as they watched, Kirby just barely managed to avoid another strike from the Nruff with a quick dash to the side.

Twilight’s eyes traced over the battlefield, flicking over the view of unconscious Nellies until they landed on the recovering Rick. He was getting back to his feet, but his positioning still gave her an idea.

“Coo,” she began, and the owl snapped to attention, “next time the Nruff runs into a hole, grab Rick, have him curl up and turn into a rock or whatever it is that he does, and clog one of the holes.”

Coo nodded and flapped over to Rick. The Nruff’s next pass–this one aiming for Gooey, an attempt that entirely failed as it just floated up above the charging boar–ended in the same tree it had been sleeping under before the fight started. With a shout, Coo hurled Rick at the hole, the hamster surrounding himself in rock and wedging himself in the gap. At the same time, Twilight shielded a second hole, the one furthest from Dedede.

The king seemed to figure out what was going on just in time, as now the Nruff only had one option. It raced out of the hole, but this time, they were ready for it. A jet of flame jutted out from Dedede’s hammer as he brought it down on the Nruff’s face at the same time that Kirby swiped at its side with his claws. For good measure, Twilight swooped down and cast a sleeping spell–it wouldn’t have worked earlier on with the Nruff as hale as it had been, but a few good hits were enough to make it vulnerable.

The alicorn panted as she landed. “Now I think that’s it.”

With a pop, Rick unstuck himself from the hole and carefully stepped over a few Nellies. “Well, that was a right mess.”

They took a moment to recover, but no longer than that. “Which way to the ocean?” Twilight asked snappily. “We’re already set back, so we need to move.”

Rick pointed towards the smoldering remains of some underbrush that had been set alight by the flaming Nelly earlier. “Thataway.”

A few seconds later, and the group was on the cliff’s edge over the water. The wind had picked up significantly, and the ocean below them was visibly churning. Looking up, Twilight winced at the sky. It was rather overcast, and looked like it would start raining at any point. Any hope of possibly flying all the way to–she mentally scoffed–Dark Castle was shot with that; her inexperience with flying would not help her at all with wet wings.

The next island, Ripple Field, was visible, at least. It looked less like an island, though, and more like a series of sandbars. But it was near sea level, for once, and would at least be easy to get to.

“I’m not liking the weather,” Twilight eventually stated, “but I can levitate Rick and Bandana Dee while the rest of us fly, at least.”

“You won’t need to worry about Rick, Your Highness,” Coo said. “I can carry the big lug.”

Twilight glanced at Bandee, and at his nod, picked him up in her telekinesis. She flared her wings, and the entire assemblage took off for Ripple Field.

Author's Note

Coo, the Possessed Owl
This purple owl's been taken over by some of the Darkness! It's not much, though, so you can work together to bring him down!

Nruff and Nellies, the Enraged Boars
Nruffs and Nellies don't usually work together like this, but something's made them mad at Kirby and friends! But you can outlast them, so bring in some bacon!

And that's two islands down, with Nruff and a lot of Nellies defeated! I feel like having the animal friends as minibosses has been working out strangely well for this fic, but it truly is just a shame that DL2 doesn't have any miniboss music. At least none that I could find.

There's five islands to go, though calling the next one an "island" is a little generous, I'd say. But that's to be elaborated on in chapter twenty-eight: Ocean Blue.

Chapter XXIX: Indigo Ice

Iceberg, fittingly for its name, was cold–extremely so. Twilight shivered as they approached the gravelly beach, and the only thing that was staving off hypothermia for herself, Rick, Coo, and Bandee was a constant warming charm. Dedede could handle it just fine, Kirby and Gooey didn’t seem to mind the cold at all, and Kine claimed that he’d swam in worse before.

Given his propensity for cryokinesis, Twilight could believe it.

Regardless of her charm, though, Twilight was absolutely glad to be out of the water. She was still soaked, but at least now she could begin actually drying off, especially since the cliff near them was acting as a nice barrier against the wind and rain. As she fluttered her wings a bit to try and fling the excess water off of them, she glanced around at the island itself.

The beach they were on was mostly made of gravel, straddling the ocean on one side and an icy cliff on the other. The cliff rose up a few dozen meters, and from what Twilight could tell swimming in, the island itself was mostly a plateau. Scaling the cliff didn’t exactly seem like an ideal option, what with most of the visible rock face being coated in ice.

Thankfully, that didn’t seem like their only option, for there was a cave in the cliff face at ground level. “Hey, Dedede,” she asked, “you’ve been here before, right?”

Dedede pointed his hammer up the cliff. “I’ve been up top–that’s where the castle on Iceberg is.” He looked at the beach they were on. “Though, this could make a decent port.”

“What about the cave there?” Twilight pointed out.

Dedede frowned, unsure, but Bandee spoke up. “We’ve sent a couple of Rockies down into Iceberg’s caves to survey them,” he said. “I think they mentioned something about a cave on a beach, so this should link up to an exit on the surface.”

“Good enough for me!” Rick called, rolling up to the cave. “It’ll be nice to have some bloody shelter!”

“Hold it!” Kine shouted from the water. Twilight watched, amazed and a bit disturbed, as he breached out of the water and flopped–albeit a bit slowly–on the land to join them. “Youse didn’t forget ‘bout me, right?”

“Are you…sure you want to come?” Bandee asked, concerned.

“‘Ey, just ‘cause I’m a fish don’t mean anythin’!” Kine answered, his voice carrying far more conviction than a talking fish flopping about on gravel had any right to. “Someone messed wit’ my wife, messed wit’ my mind, an’ messed wit’ da Rainbow Bridges. I’ve gotta send dem sleepin’ wit’ da fishes.”

Twilight narrowed her eyes at the cave, plotting their way forward. “Yeah, well, get in line,” she said. “You’re not the only one with a bone to pick with this thing.”

Coo spat some of his feathers from his beak–it seemed that he’d been preening himself in the meantime–and cleared his throat. “In any case, Kine, I do believe I may be able to help you with your mobility problem, now that we’re out of that blasted rain.”

He flapped his wings and–amazingly, for an owl that had just gotten out of the surf–lifted off easily. After grabbing onto Kine’s dorsal fin with a talon, it took considerably more effort for him to rise into the air with the fish in tow, but it worked.

“There,” Coo said, “now you won’t have to flop about everywhere.”

Dedede sauntered forward to the cave entrance, and gestured for the others to follow. “Alright, let’s get moving, then!”

Once they’d gotten a considerable way into the cave, the group switched around their order a bit. Twilight, being able to generate light with her magic, took point. Gooey was in the back, keeping watch behind them with its electricity (something that Twilight was going to have to look into at some point). Coo and Kine fluttered overhead, keeping as clear as they could from the barely-visible icy stalactites. Bandee, Dedede, and Rick stayed in the middle, while Kirby kept his claws ready at Twilight’s side to fight back if something attacked them.

Navigating the caves was a challenge enough on its own, even with Bandee having a decent enough knowledge of them for a mental map. Twilight was placing magical beacons down at every intersection they came across just to be safe. They’d already had to backtrack twice at dead ends, but the group could tell that they were moving generally upwards. That, at least, was good.

“I, uh, think we take a right, here,” Bandee said as they approached the next fork in the path.

“Ya sure on this one?” Rick asked a bit testily.

Bandee nodded, not that it was visible in the poor lighting. “We’ve gotta be close to the top, now. And that way goes up!”

“He’s got a point,” Twilight agreed.

There was a squelching sort of noise above them, and everyone stopped short. The noise did as well, before there was another squelch.

Twilight swiveled her ears.

Another squelch sounded out, this one right above her.

Coo squawked. “Princess, watch out!”

His warning came too late, however. She was tensed to move, but before she could spring away her vision suddenly went dark. Something wet and heavy had fallen directly on her face, and she let out a muffled cry as she realized that whatever it was had covered her nose and mouth as well. Reflexively, mostly in an attempt to be able to breathe again, she fired off a concussive spell directly at the tip of her horn.

It worked to force whatever it had been off of her, but she had felt it sap away some latent magical power as well. As her head felt quite a bit lighter and she could take in air again, she realized something rather pertinent: her head felt too light.

The Element of Magic was missing.

Instead of securely on Twilight’s head, it was in the grasp of a very pink octopus that had been launched a ways forward by her hasty spell. The Element was glowing brightly, clearly trying to expel whatever darkness had possessed the poor creature. But its tentacles were long, enough so to keep the tiara’s influence from its head.

In the faint light of her spell, Twilight could see that it was wearing a cute little red bow, too. By all means, it was something that Fluttershy would have fawned over. But its gaze was hard and its eyes blackened, a sure sign that the darkness was in control.

For a moment, Twilight and the octopus just stared at each other, the air between them tense.

Then it switched which tentacle it was holding the Element of Magic with and scurried off, and the tension broke.

“After it!” Twilight shouted, her hooves skidding a bit on the icy floor of the cave as she started galloping.

She nearly slammed into the wall as she rounded a corner at speed, but recovered quickly. She kept charging forward while Coo, with Kine in tow, swung around the bend as well. The fish fired out a spurt of water at the fleeing octopus while the owl flung a few feathers forward.

The octopus managed to dodge Coo’s feathers, jumping directly into Kine’s projectile. While it shivered a bit at the cold water, it was still able to use it to its advantage. The water pushed it forward even further, and it snuck into a gap in the wall that was far too thin for any of the group to get through.

Of course, that was inconsequential to Twilight. The cave on the other side of the wall was more than wide enough to accommodate her, so she simply flared her horn and performed a short-range teleport. She didn’t even slow down, resuming her pursuit of the octopus as soon as she was through.

The short lull had given it time to get further away, though, and she was able to just barely see it rounding another corner. Twilight turned the corner herself not long after, and momentarily stalled as her eyes adjusted to the sudden change in lighting. This cave led directly to the surface, and while the storm was still ongoing, the meager sunlight that got through was still far more than in the deeper caves.

It didn’t take long for her eyes to adjust, though, and she was tearing out of the cave and after the octopus only seconds later. The cave’s exit dumped them out onto a mostly flat, snow-covered plain, the cold rain on the other islands having been replaced here by softly-falling snowflakes. It was a welcome change, for sure–once she properly dried and preened her wings, Twilight would be able to actually fly again.

She was starting to miss it, which came as a bit of a surprise. The feeling of freedom that came with self-powered flight was exhilarating, sure, but she had mostly been using that skillset for simply useful circumstances. Perhaps she’d have to fly more often later.

Of course, the more pressing matter at the moment was her missing Element. The octopus thief had run off towards the only large structure she could see on the island: a small stone castle. It wasn’t nearly the size or grandiosity of Castle Dedede, nor anywhere near as intricate as the Castle of the Two Sisters or Canterlot Palace, but it was serviceable. Castles were, Twilight supposed, military installations first and foremost.

No matter where it hid, though, Twilight knew that the octopus couldn’t get away from her for long. It slipped inside the castle easily, but Twilight’s magic was uncompromising. The doors slammed open, and she galloped through the stone halls in hot pursuit of the thief.

Thirty seconds and three flights of stairs later, and Twilight had finally cornered her foe. They were at the end of a long hallway, the only defining features of which were its many windows. The octopus looked around, its dark eyes searching for any way to get out of its predicament as it shifted which tentacle was holding the crown again.

It found one fairly easily.

The sound of shattering glass rang out as the octopush defenestrated the Element of Magic. Twilight’s horn flared instantly, slamming the octopus into the wall and out of the way of the window. She fired a destructive beam of magic at the rest of the glass, shattering it and allowing her to jump out of the now-empty frame.

Her magic caught her Element easily, stalling its fall under a meter above the ground. But only now, plummeting from three stories up, did Twilight realize her mistake. Her wings were still damp and disorganized, so as she desperately flapped, it did little to properly slow her down. Her instinctive use of pegasus magic was helping, sure, but she’d still likely break a leg upon landing.

Twilight preemptively winced and shut her eyes, bracing for a painful landi-

“Gotcha!”

A powerful hand closed around the scruff of her neck, and the expected pain never came. Instead, snow flew in all directions as Dedede landed, Twilight safely held in his grasp. She had canceled her telekinesis in surprise, but thankfully Bandee was there to catch her Element as it dropped the final centimeters to the ground. She gratefully took it as Dedede dropped her and a pervading sense of calm took over as she secured it back on her head. With a stronger sticking charm, this time.

She resolved to try harder to keep it here. With it gone, she had felt overcome with rage, almost moreso than when she had fought Kirby in the skies above Castle Dedede. Clearly it had been shielding her mind from whatever emotional manipulation the darkness had sown, and her mental state without it had been…unpleasant.

Speaking of Kirby, though, it seemed that the rest of the group had caught up. The pink puffball himself had traded out his fursuit ability for a hat that looked to be made entirely of ice. Gooey was still that yellowish color, and there was a rut in the snow where Rick had rolled up to them. Dedede and Bandana Dee had been the ones to help catch her, of course, while Coo and Kine were above them, checking out the window Twilight had jumped from.

“‘Ey, Twi!” Kine called. “Ya might wanna get up ‘ere an’ finish da job. Dat octopus looks like it’s gettin’ up!”

Twilight vanished in a flash of teleportation, reappearing right back in the hallway. The octopus immediately tried to flee, but Twilight was not having it. She activated her Element near instantly, purging the fragment of darkness first from the octopus, and second from the world entirely.

“There,” Twilight said, satisfied, “that should do it.”

The octopus groaned. “Merde…What in the world was that?” she asked.

“You were momentarily possessed by something that’s been going around and destroying the Rainbow Bridges,” Twilight explained, the spiel quite well-rehearsed by now. “We’ve purged it from you and destroyed the fragment that was directly controlling you.”

The octopus blinked, her eyes now distinctly blue. “Well, thanks a ton for that! Sorry aboot attacking you.”

Twilight waved it off. “It’s a non-issue.” She gestured out the window. “The same thing happened to Coo and Kine here.” Gesturing back at herself, she continued. “I’m Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria.”

The octopus offered a tentacle to shake. “Chuchu,” she responded curtly. “A pleasure to meet you, Your Highness.”

The introduction was rather undercut by Twilight’s stomach loudly growling. She blushed and sheepishly rubbed the back of her head. “Maybe we should continue over some lunch,” she suggested. Poking her head out of the window, she shouted down at the group below. “Hey, Dedede! You said you own this castle, right?”

“I will!”

“So do you know where the food is?”

“What time is it, actually?” Cadance asked. She gestured out of Discord’s window and towards the purple abyssal void surrounding his home. “It’s a bit hard to tell.”

Pinkie’s stomach loudly growled, even moreso than Twilight’s had only moments earlier.

“It’s about three in the afternoon,” Discord answered, surprised even as he said it.

Idly, he snapped his tail and summoned a full lunch spread for his guests. Spirit of Chaos he may be, but he wasn’t a monster!

“We’ve been here for ten hours?” Shining asked, astonished.

“Time flies when you’re watching your friends engage with threats to their life and limb!” Pinkie answered before stuffing her face with a cupcake, having already located the desert section of the buffet table.

“An’ the rest of us didn’t get here ‘til ‘round seven,” Applejack pointed out.

“They do seem to be speeding up,” Rarity added. “Why, I do wager that the next three islands might not take them nearly as long as the previous three.”

“Yeah, until they have to deal with Spike,” Rainbow countered.

Rarity raised a hoof and took a breath, before considering the statement. “That is fair,” she conceded.

“Speaking of family,” Fluttershy began, turning to look at Shining, “I, um, wanted to ask…do you and Twilight’s parents know what’s happening?”

Shining frowned. “Princess Celestia said that she told them a few days before Twily’s disappearance was made public, but I haven’t heard from them in a while.” He turned towards his wife. “We might want to check in on them soon. Who knows what they might try to do to help.”

“I don’t mean no disrespect,” Applejack started, “but what exactly could they do? Princesses Celestia and Luna are already helpin’ Sunburst an’ Starlight research it!”

“Well, Night Light is an astrophysicist,” Cadance pitched in, “so he might have something to offer.” She frowned and tapped her chin. “But Velvet’s just a freelance editor, so I’m not sure she’d be able to help much.”

Shining chuckled. “Oh, trust me, you do not want to underestimate Mom. She got through raising me, Twily, and Spike, after all!”

Plus, he mentally added for the sake of not spilling government secrets, there’s the matter of who she edits for.

“So, honey, how did it go?” Twilight Velvet asked her husband as he entered their home in Canterlot.

Night Light sighed and closed the door. “Well, the Sunburst fellow mentioned that if they need an expert on supernovae, I’ll be the first to know, even if that’s vanishingly unlikely.” He chuckled a bit. “I think he was a bit shocked to talk on even hoofing with one of his former professors, though.”

“Any ancient magical artifacts that they need?” Velvet pressed. “I’m sure Daring would be more than willing to…procure them if need be.”

“None yet,” Night Light answered. “But I’m sure one or both of us will be heading down to Ponyville again soon, so we can ask again then.”

Velvet blinked in surprise. “How soon is soon?”

“Probably within a week or so,” Night Light said. “Discord apparently has a visual window into the universe Twilight’s in, and I want a good look at it.” His gaze turned down, a bit forlorn. “I just hope she’s alright, Vel.”

Velvet embraced her husband and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. “I’m sure she will be,” she said, though it sounded almost like she was trying to convince herself as well. “Twilight’s tough, and she’s gotten out of worse scrapes before. Remember the first Want-it-Need-it incident?”

A ghost of a smile crossed Night Light’s face and he snorted in amusement. “How could I forget? The school was shut down for days.”

Castle Iceberg’s food stores weren’t exactly large at the moment, given that Dedede and his servants hadn’t done all that much work on restoring it, yet. But it had some nonperishables stored in the kitchens, enough for the group of eight to have a quick meal.

Of course, Kirby had been rather disappointed by his meager proportions, but food was limited.

It was filling enough for Twilight, at least, and took care of the bumps and scrapes they had accrued since Big Forest. Food here generally felt like it had more calories per gram than at home, and she supposed that that was necessary for it to heal like it did.

As the others were finishing up, she took to running her magic over her wings, searching for feathers that were out of place. There were few that she couldn’t directly correct, which was helpful, but she did still have to yank a couple of them out and discard them.

Bandee looked at her curiously as she winced in pain pulling another feather out. “What…what are you doing?”

“Preening,” Twilight answered. “I can fly better in the snow than I can in the rain, so I’m taking the downtime here to fix my wings.”

“So your wings are like a bird’s?” Bandee asked.

“Sort of,” Twilight responded. “They’re mostly just conduits for pegasus magic–they’d be too small to get me off the ground otherwise–but I still need them to provide some minimum amount of lift.”

“So you’re gonna be able to fly to the next island?” Dedede piped up.

Twilight shrugged. “I hope so! My wings are still a bit damp, but I’ve seen pegasi fly in heavy rain before. My main problem in Ripple Field had been them being waterlogged.”

There was the rumble of thunder in the distance, and Bandee looked unsure of Twilight’s hope. “It sounds like it’s getting worse out there.”

“Where’s this weather coming from, anyway, eh?” Chuchu asked. “I’ve seen Iceberg get some bad snowstorms, but this is the first thundersnow I’ve seen!”

Rick pointed out of a window, where the swirling dark clouds were visible around a mountaintop not too far away. “The gully raker looks like it’s comin’ in from Cloudy Park over there.”

Dedede’s eyes narrowed. “Kracko,” he realized.

Most of the group suddenly looked distinctly nervous, though Twilight just frowned. “Isn’t that the being you gave one of the Star Rod fragments too? And…didn’t Sunset say she fought him on Skyhigh?”

“Yeah, but…” Bandee trailed off, thinking of how to put this. “Kracko’s strong. Really strong. And I don’t know how he’ll react to the Rainbow Bridges’ destruction.”

Coo scarfed down the last of his meal and took to the air. “Well, let’s get a bloody move on, then! Don’t want to dilly dally with the cloud monster complicating things!”

Twilight nodded in agreement. “Right.” She stood and made her way to the door. “Red Canyon is closer, but we’ve nearly caught up to Spike! We can do this!”

Kirby frowned for a moment about being dragged away from his food, before he decided to simply discard his icy hat and inhale the rest of it.

The walk across the rest of Iceberg was largely uneventful. The top of the island was a mostly flat plateau, so while they did have to trudge through the snow, they could see all the way to their destination. Their destination, and the pile of icy rocks around it serving as another entrance to Iceberg’s underground caverns.

Of course, it was just their luck that, as they passed the cave, a massive roar echoed out from within it. A frosty wind blasted from the cave entrance, and Twilight just barely leapt out of the way before it hit the snow, coating it in a thick layer of ice. The ground seemed to shake as whatever had attacked them took a step, exiting the cave and being illuminated in the overcast light.

It appeared to be a dragon of some sort, albeit smaller than the dragons that Twilight was familiar with. That still meant it was rather large, standing taller than Dedede, even on its stubby legs. It had no wings, its cyan back only holding a series of small spikes, down to its clearly powerful tail. Its wide-open mouth contained only four sharp fangs, but it seemed like it took up almost the entire upper half of its body.

If it wasn’t prepared to actively attack them, Twilight might’ve even found it sort of cute.

“Sacre bleu, it’s the Ice Dragon!” Chuchu exclaimed, seeming torn between amazement and terror. “Everything happening must’ve woken it up!”

The dragon wasted no time attacking them, breathing another cone of frost at them. Twilight countered with a powerful warming charm, melting its icy breath into an ineffective puddle. Dedede rushed forward to try and add in a hammer swing, but the Ice Dragon simply took it and slid backwards, seeming no worse for wear.

It jumped high in the air–how, Twilight was unsure, given the stubbiness of its legs–before trying to crash back down directly on Coo and Kine by rapidly flailing its tail to hover.

Really, that just gave Twilight even more questions.

Thankfully, the owl saw it coming and was able to fly out of the way, and Kine shot at the falling dragon with a quick spurt of water and a call of “‘Ey, we’re flyin’, ‘ere!”

The Ice Dragon shrugged off the hit from the water easily enough, and landed directly next to Gooey. Upon landing in the snow, spikes of ice shot out in all directions, nearly spearing Gooey straight through! But the blob managed to just barely avoid it, launching itself forward and delivering an electrical shock and dark laser right to the Ice Dragon.

That finally seemed to actually do something, sending the dragon stumbling backwards a bit, but it retaliated before the group could press their advantage. It spat a beam of pure cold–another oddity in this world’s physics that Twilight resolved to study later–at Gooey, knocking it backwards and freezing it to the ground as its yellow coloration faded back to a navy blue.

Kirby wasn’t taking the abuse at his friends lying down, though. He rushed forward and inhaled one of the ice spikes the dragon had created, regaining his icy hat. The dragon tried to breathe an icy breath at him, but Kirby retaliated with one of his own, overpowering the dragon’s! It still didn’t seem to do much as it connected, but it forced the dragon to back off its assault.

It also distracted it from Rick, who was plowing through the snow as a rocky ball. He uncoiled as he got close, spitting three globs of fire right at the Ice Dragon.

That got their enemy to actually wail in pain, and it launched back into the air to escape, switching targets towards Bandee. The general dove out of the way of the ice spikes as the dragon landed, and he called out an idea that, in retrospect, seemed obvious. “Attack it with fire!” he shouted.

Kirby threw away his hat and nodded at Rick, who shot two fireballs at him and Gooey, unfreezing the latter and allowing both to copy it.

In the meantime, Bandee had batted away two icy projectiles with his spear, giving Dedede time to rush towards it, his hammer spewing fire from one of its faces. He still hit it with the non-flaming side, since the entire reason his hammer was able to do that was for thrust, but it was powerful enough to send the dragon directly into a stream of fire that spewed forth from Twilight’s horn.

She wasn’t quite as good at the subtleties of pyroturgy as Sunset was, but she had more than enough sheer power to make up for it.

Adding onto it, Kirby and Gooey both bodily launched into the Ice Dragon while coated in fireballs, with Rick adding in a bit of extra firepower as well. The dragon writhed in pain for a few seconds, but let out a roar and a pulse of cold air shot out in all directions, interrupting the group’s attack. The dragon was clearly damaged, but not out of the fight at all.

Its gaze turned to Chuchu and, disturbingly fast for a creature of its stature, launched itself at the mostly defenseless octopus. But mostly defenseless meant that she still had some defenses, and she scurried out of the way before the dragon landed. Reaching up while it was still in the air, Chuchu grabbed onto the dragon with no less than three of her tentacles, digging as many of her suckers into it as she could. With a heave of disproportionate strength, she threw the Ice Dragon back.

Twilight’s horn flared with light as she wrapped her telekinesis around it as well, keeping it from landing as long as possible. It was actually a bit lighter than she had expected, but still heavy enough to force her to grunt with effort as she slammed it into the side of the cave it had come from. It slumped down as it slid to the ground, and Kirby adding in some additional fire of his own finally proved to be too much for it.

As the Ice Dragon hit the ground again, it was unconscious.

“Right,” Rick said after the group took a moment to collect themselves. “That’s that blighter down for the count!”

Dedede pointed his hammer towards Red Canyon, the snow collecting on his cap almost looking like a powdered wig. “Let’s cross the ocean and get to the next island!” He grinned. “Just watch that darkness bastard try and stop us!”

As the group began moving again, Twilight curiously glanced up at her Element. It hadn’t glowed at all during the fight, so she supposed that the dragon hadn’t been possessed despite its pure black eyes–it had just been angry.

That was somewhat of a relief, actually. Clearly the darkness that had taken her brother wasn’t powerful enough yet to directly possess more than a few things per island. Hopefully that would stay consistent.

She winced as a rumble of thunder echoed out from Cloudy Park. There’s only one Bridge left, she mentally countered herself. Who knows what’ll happen when it’s destroyed.

Rain and wind whipped every which way, as Kracko’s power flailed about unfiltered in his anger. Lightning crashed every few seconds, some shocks managing to hit his target. But even when lightning hit the now nearly two meter tall dragon, it did nothing, seeming to simply discharge through him and into the ground with no ill effect.

Kracko didn’t particularly know why he was attacking–he’d never seen this dragon before in his life, after all–but he knew that he was wrathful.

The Darkness, of course, knew exactly why this cloud golem was angry. It was…unfortunate that it was stalling it for so long, but in the end it would only be a minor hinderance. Looking into the dragon’s biology had been a profitable choice, as it had allowed the Darkness to nonlethally rearrange his internal structure.

Dragons seemed to break down gemstones, particularly corundum, to get at the mana within their crystal structures. To do this, they had a specialized organ, coated in an insulating layer of diamond, which their magic kept hot enough to melt cryolite. Dragons–Equestrian dragons, that is–used their diamond-studded teeth to crush corundum and transfer it to this organ, where it was dissolved in the molten cryolite. A magic-induced voltage, run through silicon kept hot enough to act as a conductor, broke down the aluminum oxide and released the magic stored within the chemical bonds.

If the Darkness was capable of finding the physical processes of draconic gemstone digestion intriguing, it would have. But it had no appreciation for the subtleties of draconic biology, only interested in knowing enough to not kill its host. It found no ill effects to moving some of the silicon around, and so it did.

The dragon’s internal body temperature outside of its gemstone-digesting organ was still hot enough to allow the silicon to properly conduct electricity, so he now had an internal wire stretching from his right clawtips down to his right sole. So long as the Darkness kept the dragon’s right foot planted on the ground, the cloud golem could not harm it. No matter how much lightning it shot, it would always ground through the silicon.

It gave the Darkness further ideas, as well. If it could determine how to induce a voltage voluntarily, it may have been able to use limited electrokinesis in the dragon’s body. But for now, it had other things to worry about.

The cloud golem had been physically preventing its advance for hours now, the wind and rain forming a near impenetrable fortress. But the Darkness had broken through–at a regrettable but necessary cost to some of the dragon’s health–and was now able to directly approach the enraged cloud.

The Darkness channeled some of its power into the dragon’s right arm, stretching it to lengths far beyond what it was naturally capable of. Some of the dragon’s bones shattered in the process, but that was inconsequential to the Darkness. It would simply repair them later.

Its true goal in this battle, however, was now within its grasp. The dragon’s right claw grabbed ahold of one of the could golem’s copper spikes, its attempts at attacking with electricity futility grounding through the internal wiring. Focusing for a moment, the Darkness split some of itself and pushed it into the cloud golem. It was a bit more power than was ideal, but it would be necessary to fully bring the cloud under its control.

The wind and rain died down as the cloud’s eye blackened, becoming dark as night. The Darkness let go of the cloud, retracting the dragon’s arm back to its natural state. The cloud golem moved away, allowing the Darkness free passage to the final bridge.

As it walked past a rock that some ancient, primordial part of the dragon’s brain identified as “cool-looking,” it pushed down a niggling in the back of the dragon’s mind. The desire to hoard had been growing stronger within the dragon the more the Darkness abused its growth, but so far it had been successful in identifying, collecting, and discarding the emotion.

The intelligent part of the dragon’s mind was the part that actually concerned it. His mind had nearly awoken while it was fighting the cloud golem, and it had cost the Darkness precious time to quiet it down again. It seemed like it had underestimated the dragon’s Heart again, but it still was nothing that it couldn’t handle.

It had possessed far more difficult hosts before, after all.

The final bridge shattered behind it, a wave of apathy echoing out across the planet. It stored the final violet gemstone and looked up at the castle before it. This would do quite nicely as a base of operations to spread its influence until the Great Work could begin on this planet.

It wouldn’t be long, now, until the Whole arrived.

Until the Darkness could claim this world as its own.

Author's Note

Chuchu, the Possessed Octopus
This pink cephalopod has been corrupted by the darkness's influence! She's fast, but you're faster! Catch up and retrieve the Element of Magic!

Ice Dragon, the Ancient Master of Cold
The Ice Dragon has lived on Iceberg since ancient times, and seen countless ages. Its origins are unknown, but it only awakes from its slumber to take its revenge on those who disturb it.

That's four islands down, with three to go. But the Darkness has destroyed the final Rainbow Bridge, so the emotional state of our heroes might get a bit...finicky soon.

Oh, and Chuchu's here a game early! DL3 just sort of has its new animal friends already there, with no need to rescue them or any explanation to how Kirby knew them beforehand. I felt a bit bad leaving them out of the action, so here they are! Stay tuned for more adventures in chapter thirty: Red Soil.

Chapter XXX: Red Soil

“Hey, looks like the storm’s clearing up a bit!”

Twilight glanced up at the sky, and blinked in surprise as Bandee’s statement was confirmed. It was still overcast, but it had stopped snowing on them, and it even seemed like the Sun was beginning to peek through the clouds over Red Canyon. For a moment, she felt hopeful. That things could–and would–improve.

Then a rumble of thunder, far louder than they had heard before, echoed out from Cloudy Park, and that hope was dashed. The storm hadn’t let up, it had just become far more localized.

Dedede sat down hard, sending snow flying behind him. With a heavy sigh, he planted his hammer on the ground. “So that’s it, then?” he despaired. “It hits Bridge number seven and we just lose?”

“I…I’m sure we still have time, Your Majesty!” Bandana Dee stuttered out, his voice wavering. “It’s…it’s not over yet.”

Rick nodded emphatically. “The world’s not endin’ while we’ve got some fight left in us!”

Twilight paced back and forth, her mind rushing through thought after thought. This particular wave of apathy didn’t feel like it had affected her that much, but these sorts of things could be impossible to detect sometimes. “We don’t have time for this,” she spoke up. “Rick’s right, the world hasn’t ended yet. But it will soon if we don’t hurry up.”

With that, she spread her wings and took off, moving towards Red Canyon so fast she left a trail of violet sparkles behind her.

Coo eventually cleared his throat as Dedede began recovering. “She…does know that we’re all quite a bit slower than her, does she not?”

“Twi seemed a might bit upset there,” Applejack pointed out. “That ain’t jus’ me seein’ that, right?”

“It most certainly is not just you,” Rarity answered. “Twilight does seem rather stressed.”

“Frankly, I’m impressed that she lasted this long,” Cadance pitched in. “Twilight’s never handled stress very well.”

“You could say that again,” Rainbow said.

“Why’d she just leave them behind like that, though?” Pinkie asked, a slight frown crossing her face.

Discord stroked his beard, his snaggletoothed grin prevalent as he peered at the screen. “Yes, it doesn’t seem very…princess-y of her, does it?”

Applejack turned to look at Shining. “What do you think, Yer Highness? You’re her brother, after all.”

Shining sighed. “Like Cadance said, Twily’s never handled stress well. And she’s always been protective of Spike, so add on those Bridges messing with her emotions and it’s a miracle she didn’t snap at them.”

“If, um, you don’t mind me asking, Mister Shining Armor, sir,” Fluttershy piped up, “you’ve been really calm, even when Twilight and the others are fighting. How do you do it?”

“Training, to be honest,” Shining answered quickly. “I want to be upset, to rage against the unfairness of the world, to scream and throw things and beg Discord here to figure out a faster way to get into that universe.” He shrugged. “But Princess Celestia already has ponies on working that out, so the most I can do is swallow my pride and accept that all I can do is watch and critique their fighting styles.”

Discord cleared his throat. “On the topic of breaking into Void’s multiverse, while I do maintain that us breaking into it will be impossible in your lifetimes, Twiggles and the others might be able to bust out of it.”

“Didn’t y’all say that breakin’ that barrier’d destroy everythin’, or somethin’ like that?” Applejack asked.

“If it’s shattered without weakening it first, yes, it would destroy everything inside of Void’s multiverse,” Discord affirmed. “But Void is still in there, somewhere. If they can figure that out, find It, and manage to get It to weaken–or just remove–the barrier they might be able to get back here.” He shrugged. “But it’s something that they’ll have to pull off from the inside. Void shut down Its multiverse over two thousand years ago, and no one’s seen It since.”

Pinkie tapped her chin. “Hey, isn’t that around the same time those Nova myths were supposed to originate from?”

The group went silent, everypony looking at each other in surprise and realization. “Ya don’t think…” Applejack trailed off.

“It is a distinct possibility,” Rarity noted.

“I feel a bit out of the loop here,” Cadance mused.

“Nova was a giant wish-granting machine!” Pinkie explained. “Sunset destroyed it, but all the myths and stories about it were two thousand years old!”

“Princess Luna thinks that there was a horrible calamity, then,” Fluttershy quietly added. “And if it has to do with Void…oh, I hope there’s another way for them to get back home.”

Twilight’s landing in Red Canyon was rough, both because of the terrain and because she was moving quite a bit faster than she was used to. The soil wasn’t soft enough to plow a trench through, though, so she just took a bit of a tumble upon trying to touch down. It was a bit painful, but she just ignored it and brushed herself off.

As she stood, she took in her surroundings. Red Canyon was, of course, very red and very rocky. She’d landed on the top of a cliff near the water’s edge, but even then it was one of the lower parts of the island. The whole thing was a mountain, totalling out at probably a kilometer above sea level. Interestingly, the mountain seemed to be split in twain, a jagged canyon running right through it.

She had been correct on her assessment of the sky earlier, as well. It was still overcast over most of the island, but near the summit the clouds split in a nearly perfect circle, casting sunlight down onto the dual peaks. She could only assume that something fishy was going on up there.

All-in-all, the environment seemed unforgiving. There was very little vegetation besides some hardier tufts of grass that clung to the canyon walls. But that openness meant it would be easier to fly around and scout out the landscape. She’d just have to be careful of rocky outcrops when landing.

Briefly, Twilight glanced back at Iceberg and considered waiting up for the others. She shook her head and took to the air again. Her mission here was simple: find whatever poor sap the darkness had possessed on this island, free them, and head on to Cloudy Park. She could do that on her own just fine.

Ten minutes of aimless searching later, and the thought came to her that maybe this hadn’t been the brightest idea. Of course, admitting that to herself would mean admitting that she’d made a critical error somewhere, which would mean she had a real chance of failing to save Spike, which was not a possibility even worth considering.

She was going to exorcize that thing out of her brother’s body, and then kick its ass into next Tuesday.

Just as soon as she took a quick rest.

Her wings were getting tired.

She landed–taking care for this one to be quite a bit less rough than the last–on a ledge of rock that stuck out over the ravine. Her wings weren’t exactly sore yet, but she wanted to take the chance to rest them a bit. They were still a bit damp from earlier and heavier than usual, so she didn’t exactly want to risk flying over the canyon too much.

She looked down. Falling down there would be…bad, to say the least. The canyon carved not only through the mountain, but straight through the island itself–technically speaking, Twilight supposed that Red Canyon really was two islands. But the water below looked particularly unsafe to fall into, roiling and churning like a set of whitewater rapids.

A loud rumble of thunder made clear what was causing the unruly ocean. She couldn’t quite see it from this angle, having chosen a spot to rest essentially within the mountain, but even if the storm was now confined to Cloudy Park, it sounded like it had gotten even worse locally. She shuddered to think of what it was going to be like traversing that island, and some mutinous corner of her mind whispered that it would be easier to give in.

She shook that off very quickly, though. Giving up was an even worse thought than the idea that she might fail, because she had a duty as a princess, as a friend, as a sister to give this her all. She would see this through.

Having reaffirmed to herself that she was doing just fine in her mission, thank you very much, she pushed herself back to her hooves and prepared to take off. If she was starting to repeat nihilistic thoughts, that was more than enough rest.

Then a sudden sound above her gave her pause.

Her experience on Iceberg had taught her to be wary of unknown sounds coming from above, and she immediately tensed. She caught a quick flash of movement out of the corner of her eye as something darted down while clinging to the canyon wall. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she heard something sharp hit the ledge she was on and ducked on instinct.

That turned out to have been the correct option, as something passed through the spot her head had just been.

With a quick flap of her wings, she spun herself around to face the new adversary. It looked much like a large housecat, with a white underbelly and brown splotches on its head, back, and tail. Its front claws were extended and sharp enough to pierce into the very rock itself. Its tail lashed back and forth, and it crouched in preparation to pounce.

Its beady eyes, of course, were entirely black marbles. At least Twilight had found what she’d been looking for.

The cat lunged forward, a paw swiping at Twilight’s left side. A hasty shield made sure that it didn’t connect, but the lithe creature was already moving again. Its left paw striked out and landed a solid hit, scoring five thin red lines down Twilight’s shoulder.

Twilight sucked in a sharp breath from the pain, and a quick application of telekinesis forced the cat away from her. Its back claws resisted that, though, and she was only able to hold the telekinesis long enough to get it around half a meter away. But that was enough to buy her time to take to the air.

She activated the Element of Magic, but her attempt to force the darkness out of the cat was unsuccessful. It leapt up to avoid the beam, its claws digging into the side of the canyon and sending pebbles falling down to the surf below. With impossible agility, it scampered across the wall and jumped at Twilight again, avoiding her second attempt to score a hit.

With a hiss, it tried to rake its claws across her left side, only thwarted by her jolting a bit to the right. That instinctive movement slammed her into the wall, though, and gave the cat enough time to recover from its landing on another ledge. It hissed at her again and whirled around, taking a swipe at its flying opponent.

It snagged her tail in the attack, and Twilight yelped as she was suddenly yanked downward. A quick flare of her horn produced a shield around her flanks, stopping it from digging its claws into her back legs. It still was able to use her tail for purchase, though, and it swung around to take a swing at her wings. Twilight closed them up in response, and all the cat was able to swipe at was her mane, carving off a fairly significant portion of it.

Well, she’d been meaning to have it cut.

Her closing up her wings, however, had the secondary effect of the pair suddenly being quite grossly affected by gravity again. They didn’t have far to plummet–only a couple meters or so to another ledge–but it was enough for the cat to disengage from her tail and land on its feet, leaving Twilight to nearly bounce right off the ledge. By the time she recovered enough to continue the fight, the cat had pulled back one of its paws. It struck forward right after, pushing a considerable amount of sand towards Twilight.

And right into her eyes.

She cried out in surprise and quite a bit of pain, suddenly blinded. The cat pressed its advantage and pounced, sinking its claws into Twilight’s shoulders and sending them careening off the ledge.

She desperately flapped her wings, but with the sand in her eyes she couldn’t see where she was going. It seemed to be having some effect, though most of her attention was on a self-applied eye-watering spell and rapidly blinking, doing her best to ignore the pain of the cat’s claws.

Eventually, after a few seconds of falling, her wings found purchase again and she could feel herself lining upright. She lashed out with her back hoof, kicking the cat directly and forcing it to let go of her. It mrowed loudly as it fell, and through watery eyes Twilight aimed the Element of Magic.

The beam connected, successfully expelling the darkness from the cat’s body. But this particular blob of darkness was more nimble than the others, dodging the second beam and shooting up and past Twilight, rocketing towards the summit.

Her wings tensed, and she very nearly flew after it in pursuit. But her mind caught up to her before she did, and she caught sight of the cat again just as it plunged into the surf below. She glanced back up, then down again. Pursue the darkness and potentially save Spike sooner, or save the cat right now?

Twilight took a deep breath, her mind made up. She tensed her wings again and took off at speed.

Downward.

There was a small island of rock in the channel, large enough for them to take a bit of a break and recover. It was good enough for her, so she focused on where the cat had fallen, prepared her magic, and plunged into the water.

The currents forced her every which way, but the cat’s form was plainly visible. She focused as much as she could on the hydroturgical spells that she knew, calming the currents as much as possible. That allowed her to swim forward and grab ahold of the unconscious cat before surfacing again.

The island was only a dozen or so meters away, a short swim with some applied hydrokinesis. But with her split focus between swimming, her magic, and keeping the cat in her grasp, she was blindsided by a sudden leftward current, slamming her into the rocky wall. She gasped in pain as she heard something crack on that side of her body, but she didn’t have time to focus on that.

Her vision was metaphorically swimming by the time she had finished physically swimming, and it was only with great effort–and no small amount of adrenaline, she was sure–that she managed to heave the cat and herself out of the water and onto the small island. Comfortable that she wasn’t about to be slammed into any more rocks, she glanced back at the water and winced. She must’ve been bleeding from the impact–the water she could see, before it was washed away by the current, at least, was red.

She glanced down to properly assess the damage. With the adrenaline fading and the pain beginning to assert itself, she nearly vomited at the sight of her left wing. She may have been new to the appendages, but she was pretty damn sure that wings were not supposed to bend like that. It was bleeding pretty heavily as well, enough to stain her fur and a few feathers around the laceration red.

That, along with her other scrapes and scratches, was healed with a quick spell, which would at least stop the bleeding and keep them from getting infected. It took a bit more mana than she would’ve liked, though, so if she wanted to teleport out of there she’d have to wait a while.

And besides, even if her wing wasn’t broken, she’d gone and waterlogged them again.

That thought, though, brought to her attention just how much of a pickle she’d gotten herself into. She was sitting on a tiny rocky island, surrounded by churning waves and canyon walls, with a broken wing, an unconscious cat, and not enough mana to manage a teleport for the both of them.

She sighed deeply before speaking to herself.

“I really should’ve just waited for the others.”

“Which way d’ya think she got off to?” Rick asked as they landed. It had been a bit slower going than previous trips between islands, but they had managed to make it in only one. Bandana Dee had ridden on Dedede’s back over the gap, and Chuchu could deform herself into a surprisingly good imitation of a hot air balloon for Rick’s fire breath to power.

Bandee pointed his spear at the canyon. “Either up to the summit or down into the ravine.”

Dedede nodded in agreement.

“What makes youse say that?” Kine asked.

“Well, she’s gonna be chasing after that darkness thingy,” Dedede explained, “and where do you think that’s gonna be hanging out on an island like this?”

“That would make sense,” Chuchu acknowledged, scrambling down from Rick’s head and onto the rocky ground. “Should we check the summit first?”

Kirby nodded with a determined look on his face and started forward, leading the trek up the mountain.

Twilight paced around on what little ground was available, her mind forming and rejecting ideas at an incredible rate. Trying to fly out of this with a broken wing was just asking to break the other one. The same was true of trying to swim out. She did suppose that the best option was waiting it out and hoping that the others found her, but that felt like it would take far too long. But teleporting both herself and the cat back up to the surface would leave her too magically exhausted to be of much use.

It really was quite the dilemma.

She turned around at the edge of the rock, something that happened every few seconds of her pacing given the size of the island. This time, though, her eyes focused on the rock wall of the canyon. There were multiple rocky ledges there, enough that she could make her way back up with some minimal autolevitation and using her good wing for balance.

As she watched, though, part of one ledge crumbled away and splashed into the water. If she wanted to get up that way, she’d need a guide who knew where it was safe to stand.

And then her eyes fell upon the cat from earlier.

It was certainly far larger than a normal housecat, and the darkness had so far only directly possessed intelligent beings. It wouldn’t surprise her if the cat was sapient as well.

She’d already taken care of its wounds with a healing spell earlier, so at this point it was just sleeping off the damage. She should have thought to bring along some food from Castle Dedede before this whole adventure began, but hindsight was 20/20 and she hadn’t been in the best mental state back at the castle. Plus, she wasn’t even sure if the food she would bring would have helped–as far as she was aware, cats were carnivores.

What she lacked in food, though, she could make up for with magic. Using a wakefulness spell to wake up someone knocked unconscious generally wasn’t recommended, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

The cat yawned massively and stretched out upon waking up, looking around a bit confused. “Hey, lassie, where’re we?” he asked. “Last Ah remember that bastard blob o’ darkness had me mind in a heavy twist.”

“Well, I’ve managed to get it out of you,” Twilight explained, “but it got away before I could destroy it entirely.” She gestured around them. “Right now we’re at the bottom of the canyon, and I was wondering if you knew the best way back up. I’d fly us up there myself, but…” she waved a hoof at her broken wing and winced in a bit of pain, “my wing is broken.”

The cat frowned. “Ah dunno aboot an easy way back up, but Ah didnae hang ‘round these parts fer nothing! Ah can tell ye which rocks’re safe.”

Twilight sighed in relief. “Oh, thank goodness. For a bit there I thought we’d be stuck down here until I got enough mana together to manage a teleport.”

The cat waved her off. “Dinnae ye worry aboot that, lassie. Least Ah can dae fer ye is help ye outta this bind.” He held out a paw, his claws clearly retracted. “Name’s Nago.”

Twilight accepted the hoofshake while her horn flared and she conjured some wood. “Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria,” she replied, fashioning herself a makeshift splint in the meantime. It wouldn’t do for her broken wing to mess itself up further on the trip back up, after all.

Once her wing was splinted, Nago leapt to the nearest rocky ledge. It took a liberal application of autolevitation for her to make it over as well, but the other ledges seemed closer than this had been to the tiny island. Satisfied that Twilight was stable on the rocks, Nago leapt to the next ledge and tested its stability.

As Twilight followed, he spoke up. “So, Yer Highness, what’s got ye here in Red Canyon?”

“That darkness thing, actually,” Twilight replied, feeling a bit sick of answering the same sorts of questions island after island. “A big one possessed my brother and has been destroying the Rainbow Bridges.”

Nago growled a bit. “So that’s what had me ‘n Shiro feeling off lately.”

Twilight nodded. “It’s already destroyed all of them, so I just hope it’s staying put in Dark Castle.” She sighed, a few traitorous thoughts of failure flickering across her mind. “If it hasn’t, I don’t know how we’ll find it.”

“One step at a time, Princess,” Nago reminded. “Let’s take out the one that got me, first. Ye said it got away?”

Twilight stumbled a bit at the next jump, having to extend her good wing for balancing. “It shot directly upwards,” she reported. “I think it went to the summit.”

Nago looked up above them and frowned. “Ah know the fastest way up there, but ye’d better hope it hasn’t gone ‘n possessed ol’ Shine ‘n Bright.”

“Shine and Bright,” Twilight repeated to herself, thinking. “I think I’ve heard those names before. Dedede had them keep a piece of the Star Rod when it was broken.”

“An’ they’re Solaria ‘n Lunaris’s kids,” Nago added.

Twilight stalled for a moment, that little tidbit of information dredging itself back up from the recesses of her mind. Right, the Sun and Moon here could reproduce. She really, really did not want to know how, at this point.

“Well, knowing my luck,” Twilight sighed, “that’s just what happened.”

They continued on in silence for a while after that, but before too long and with only one or two close calls, they had made it back up to solid ground at the top of the canyon and a solid ways up the mountain. Twilight almost wanted to collapse in relief at the top, but they still had a few hundred meters left to the summit. She couldn’t give up just yet.

Still, it was a bit concerning that she hadn’t seen the others yet. Though she supposed that she had left them with only one agile flier, so it might’ve taken them a few trips to get over.

“My word, the rain was bad, but this blasted sunshine is almost worse!” Coo grumbled.

The sun wasn’t directly visible through the hole in the clouds–it was far too late in the day for that. But its heat was felt in full force, and the whole group was sweating.

“Ya dink youse have it bad?” Kine asked. “I’m a fish!”

“Oh, shut it, Kine,” Dedede groused. “At least you’re a sunfish! I was never meant for this kinda weather!”

Rick stretched, basking in the sunlight that was available. “I’m not seein’ the problem. Chuchu isn’t complainin’ any either!”

“Oh, I can handle a wide range of temperatures!” Chuchu overexplained. “You see, I like hanging out in Iceberg, but hydrothermal vents are just fine for me, aussi!”

Dedede’s eye twitched in annoyance.

Bandee sighed from near the front of the group. “Yeah, I’m kind of surprised this didn’t happen earlier.”

Kirby frowned in exasperation as well, whirling around and shouting to get the group’s attention. Once everyone was looking at him (except Gooey, who had gotten distracted by a butterfly), he did his best to cross his arms and look disappointed.

When no one spoke up, he sighed and pointedly looked at Bandee.

Bandana Dee blinked in surprise. “Oh, you want me to talk?” He cleared his throat. “Guys, we really can’t afford to fight over stuff like this. I’m sure it’s because of the Bridges and we’d be getting along just swell otherwise, but we need to keep moving.” He turned back around and pointed his spear at the summit, around half a kilometer away. “We’ll get up there, save Twilight from whatever hole she’s dug herself into, and move on to Cloudy Park.”

Chuchu tilted her head as much as an octopus could. “What makes you think the Princess is gonna need saving, eh?”

“This is Princess Twilight we’re talking about,” Bandee said, an eyebrow raised. “Smart as she is, she’ll rush into a situation headfirst if it means saving as many people as possible.”

Kirby nodded in agreement, rather distinctly remembering her actions on the Halberd.

“Come on, let’s get moving,” Bandee ordered, starting forward again. “Gooey, you coming?”

Gooey looked up before bouncing back over to the group, its dopey grin never leaving its face.

None of them noticed the little orange butterfly it had been playing with vanish with a slight flicker of flame and a puff of smoke.

As soon as Twilight and Nago reached the summit, they could tell that something felt very wrong. Perhaps it was the slightly too-strong sunlight, or the way the breeze felt just a bit too light, or the fact that the summit was shaped like a giant circular arena split down the middle by the canyon.

Though the thing that felt the most wrong was probably the fact that the sun was attacking them.

Quite literally, even. It wasn’t Solaria, but it seemed like the darkness had gotten to Mister Bright, at least. The large flaming ball contrasted starkly with his jet black eyes, lending to a disconcerting image as he swooped down at the pair.

They just barely managed to jump out of the way, and Twilight could still feel the heat behind her as he passed by. Nago hissed as well, snatching his tail away from the flame but still singeing some of his fur.

Bright was fast in turning around though, going for a second strike at Twilight. She jumped out of the way again, but added in an attack of her own in the process. She conjured up a few gallons of water and threw them at Bright, hoping it would at least damage him a bit.

The water instantly evaporated, doing just about nothing to the miniature sun. He cupped his hands together and blasted a stream of fire out of them, aiming right for Twilight. Some quick cryoturgy rendered the attack useless, at least, but Bright wasn’t done just yet. He quickly changed targets, striking Nago with a launched fireball before Twilight could react and setting the poor cat ablaze.

He yelped and danced around in surprise and pain, but was thankfully soon doused by more conjured water. But the distraction did its job as a second adversary descended from the sky. Mister Shine–his eyes just as black as his brother’s–landed right next to Twilight and promptly kicked her in the ribs.

She gasped as most of the air in her lungs was forced out and she was launched almost directly into the canyon. Luckily, she noticed in time to apply a quick autolevitation spell and desperately flap her good wing for extra airtime, and she roughly landed a meter or so away from the edge on the opposite side.

It was better than falling right into the canyon, but it didn’t feel like it. Her ribs were screaming at her and the incredible pain on her left side indicated that her splint–or at least the adhesive spell she’d used to secure it–had broken at some point as well.

Still, she forced her eyes open as Nago loudly hissed on the other side, staring down both Shine and Bright. He bared his teeth and crouched, waiting for his opponent’s next move.

It came in the form of Mister Shine charging at him, arm pulled back for a punch. But even burned, Nago was nimble. He deftly dodged around Shine’s punch, his sharp claws lashing out and digging into his arm. He ducked under the tiny moon’s next punch, and used him as a shield against Bright’s stream of fire.

It didn’t do much to Shine, but at least it stopped Nago from getting set on fire again.

But Twilight knew that the cat didn’t stand a chance in the long run, especially with him already having been burned. All Nago could do on his own was extend the fight, so ignoring the pain, she forced herself back to her hooves. She grit her teeth and lit her horn, ready to try another cryoturgical spell to help out.

A sudden shout from behind her interrupted the casting process, though.

“Tally-ho, chaps!”

A second fireball fell from the sky, landing on Mister Shine and doing far more than his brother’s fire had. A rock ball hit Mister Bright right in the face, the octopus that had thrown it clinging to the projectile hamster. A blade of sharpened air slammed into the stunned sun, and a large fish just directly landed on the moon.

“Hey, Twilight!” she heard Bandee shout, and her head whipped around to see him, Gooey, and Dedede summit the mountain. He reached into nowhere and pulled out a maxim tomato. “Catch!”

At Gooey and Dedede’s confused looks after he threw it to her, he shrugged. “I nabbed a couple from the castle before we left. Thought they might come in handy.”

Twilight caught the tossed tomato in her telekinesis and immediately shoved it into her mouth, almost sighing in relief as the pain faded and her bones rearranged themselves into the proper positions. It was still an uncomfortable feeling, but far better than the alternative. “We might need one for Nago, too.”

Dedede pointed his hammer over at the ongoing fight. “That the cat?”

Twilight nodded.

The King of Dreamland sauntered past her and crouched, ready to jump. “We’ll take it from here, Princess.”

Dedede jumped right over the canyon, landing right next to Nago and batting away Mister Bright with his hammer. Ignoring Mister Shine charging right at him–Gooey slamming into him while coated in a fireball of its own took care of him well enough–he grabbed the surprised feline by the scruff of his neck and jumped back over. He didn’t spare any words back on Twilight’s side of the canyon, just delivering Nago to her and Bandee before jumpring right back into the fray.

Bandana Dee handed over a second tomato to Nago, who sighed a bit at the fact that it was a tomato, but ate it anyway. With her wings healed and having been dried from the sun and the heat of the battle, Twilight took the opportunity to make sure they were in decent condition as they watched the fight.

It was terribly one-sided, and favor had completely flipped against Mister Shine and Mister Bright. With so many opponents to keep track of, they were simply getting swarmed. Twilight winced as Shine took a direct hit from one of Kirby’s cutters–he must have swapped out copy abilities at some point–and was launched right into a storm of Coo’s sharp feathers.

“Ye think they’ll be alright?” Nago asked.

“Well, they did need to let off some steam,” Bandee said with a shrug as Chuchu threw Rick with all her might into Mister Bright, knocking him into a hit from Kine as the fish flopped in just the right direction to spit water at him.

“Ah more meant Shine ‘n Bright,” Nago clarified. “It dinnae seem like they’re having a good time.”

Twilight’s eyes narrowed and she tensed. “Well, it looks like they’re going after us, now,” she said. “Guess we’ll find out.”

Sure enough, Shine and Bright seemed like they’d decided that enough was enough and had switched targets. The former still got hit with one more hammer swing from Dedede, but the two of them managed to break out of the beatdown they were receiving and gunned it for Twilight, Nago, and Bandee.

The general readied his spear in a fighting stance, but his spearmanship turned out to not even be necessary. For as soon as the two of them had crossed the canyon–far slower than they had been before–Twilight activated the Element of Magic and hit them with the resultant beam.

This time, the darkness didn’t escape. The bit of it that had infected Nago earlier had clearly split itself in two to possess both Shine and Bright, but that cut into its power. It simply wasn’t fast enough to avoid Twilight’s second beam, and the twin pools of nothingness were purged from existence.

Shine and Bright themselves fell to the ground, the fight and exorcism proving too much to remain conscious through.

Smiling, Twilight fluttered across the gap, levitating Nago and Bandee over as well. “Thank you, everyone.” She blushed in embarrassment a bit. “I…really shouldn’t have just left you all on Iceberg. I’m sorry.”

Dedede waved her off, a grin on his face. “Hey, you were stressed, I get it.” He patted Kirby on the head and the puffball, annoyed, used the flat of a cutter blade to push his hand away. “Kirby here knows I’ve done worse!”

Kirby’s expression made it clear what would happen if that “worse” happened again.

Reaching down, Coo hovered back into the air with Kine in his talons again. “Regardless, I do believe we should make for Cloudy Park sometime soon.”

Everyone looked over, the next island plainly visible from this angle. Its mountain reached far higher than Red Canyon’s, its summit disappeared behind the clouds. Churning, so-dark-they-were-almost-black clouds, where a flash of lightning was visible every few seconds and a deep rumble of thunder was powerful enough to reach all the way to where they were standing atop Red Canyon’s summit every so often.

Twilight took a deep breath, remembering the technique that Cadance had taught her. The darkness was powerful, and they still had two islands left, but with her allies–really, at this point she really could consider them friends–with her, she was certain that they would pull through.

As soon as Steve the Broom Hatter got into the Meta-Knights’ base proper, he felt loads better than he had been running through the forest. It was like his mind had been fighting against itself all along the journey there, like it had been actively trying to forget why he cared about his mission, or even why he cared about King Dedede at all!

Even still, there was a nagging presence at the back of his mind that none of this was worth it, and even Meta Knight was doomed to failure, but he shook it off. His king had ordered him to tell Meta Knight what was going on, so come hell or high water that was what he’d do!

It was just a bit of trouble to actually find him.

A nice Chilly had pointed him in the direction of Sailor Waddle Dee, though. She apparently knew where Meta Knight was, so surely she would gladly allow him to deliver his message!

He found her disinterestedly looking over a clipboard in the dockyards, muttering to herself. “Vul really should’ve checked back in by now…”

“Excuse me?” Steve asked, and Sailor Dee jumped in surprise as she turned around.

She would later deny any accusations of the sort.

“What do you want?” she sighed.

“King Dedede sent me to relay a message to Meta Knight!”

Sailor Dee’s eyes narrowed over her clipboard. “And how urgent is it?”

“Very,” Steve emphatically said.

The Waddle Dee rolled her eyes. “Please, Dedede would find asking for help about a clogged toilet ‘urgent.’” She turned back around. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to finish up inspectio-”

“Someone’s been possessed.”

Sailor Dee froze and nearly dropped her clipboard. “Wh-what?”

“Someone’s been possessed,” Steve repeated.

“Who?”

“S-Spike the dragon,” Steven stuttered, suddenly very put off by the Waddle Dee’s change in demeanor.

She took a deep breath before gesturing for him to follow. “Sir Meta Knight is currently sparring with Miss Shimmer. I’m not sure if interrupting them is wise, but for news like this…”

She trailed off, and neither Sailor Dee nor Steve spoke for the remainder of the short walk to the Meta-Knights’ gymnasium complex. Sailor Dee swiped some sort of key card, and the door opened, allowing the pair access.

It really was a typical gymnasium, a large pair of double doors straight down the hall leading to the gym itself, with locker rooms on either side for the species that wore clothes. Or presumably if Meta Knight ever needed to change his mask. Barely anyone ever saw him without the thing.

Sailor Dee swung the main doors open, right as there was a loud crash of sword on magic barrier.

“Very good,” Meta Knight commented. “Your shields are strong enough now that I cannot easily slice through them.”

“To be fair,” Sunset countered, “last time you fought me I wasn’t exactly at top form.”

“And I was not exactly trying,” Meta retorted.

Sailor Dee cleared her throat.

“Ah, Sailor!” Meta Knight called. He blinked. “And a Broom Hatter?”

“Steve, Sir!” Steve reported. “I come bearing urgent news from Castle Dedede! Spike the dragon has been possessed!”

Sunset gasped, but Steve’s thought process didn’t even register that. Most of his mind was focused on the sheer speed of Meta Knight as he rushed forward to grab the brim of his hat and stare directly into his eyes. The Broom Hatter sweated in dread as the knight’s yellow eyes conveyed suspicion, analysis, and–terrifyingly–the tiniest trace of fear.

It seemed like an eternity passed in under a second. Until Meta Knight, his voice cold, uttered a single word. A simple word, just asking for clarification, but one which conveyed far more emotion than simple confusion. As if the knight already had a good idea of what was going on.

“What?”

Author's Note

Nago, the Ferocious Feline
This possessed cat has decided that Red Canyon is his turf! Any in his way will get a taste of his sharp-as-swords claws, and he uses his knowledge of the terrain to his advantage! But he can't fly and hates swimming, so get him over water!

Mister Shine and Mister Bright, the Children of the Cosmos
Mister Shine and Mister Bright are the sons of Solaria and Lunaris. They usually get along with each other (far more than their parents!) and the other denizens of Dreamland, but the darkness has possessed them! But Mister Bright can't stand the cold, and Mister Shine hates being left in the dark!

Five islands down. Two to go. But things are ramping up for our heroes, and Kracko isn't going to let them through Cloudy Park easily. Hopefully they've learned their lesson on sticking together, lest the storm strike them down for good. And things aren't just heating up in the Rainbow Islands either, for it seems like Meta Knight might know something about our dark little antagonist.

Stick around for the penultimate chapter of this arc, and our heroes' greatest challenge yet. Chapter thirty-one: Orange Sunsets.

Chapter XXXI: Orange Sunsets

“S-Spike the dragon was possessed,” Steve stuttered out, terrified out of his mind.

“What color were his eyes?” Meta Knight asked, his voice low.

Steve shuddered, unable to properly formulate a response.

“What color were Spike’s eyes?” Meta repeated.

“P-Princess Twilight said that they w-were black,” Steve said.

Meta Knight’s eyes went wide and he backed off. Steve almost collapsed as he did, having to prop himself up on his broom. The knight’s eyes were calculating behind his mask, but he seemed to reach a conclusion in only a moment. “Are they still at Castle Dedede?”

Steve shakily shook his head no. “I d-don’t know where they went, but they’re chasing after Spike.”

“Guesswork it is,” Meta Knight sighed. “Shimmer, with me,” he ordered, turning to walk out of the gymnasium. “Sailor, you’re in charge of the complex until I get back.”

Sailor Dee saluted. “I won’t let you down, Sir!”

As soon as they had exited the gymnasium, Sunset raised an eyebrow at the knight. “What was that about? You scared the dude half to death!”

Instead of answering directly, Meta Knight looked up at the sky. The sunset was just as beautiful as previous ones over Orange Ocean, illuminating the waters in that strange glow. “Sky’s still clear,” he said. “We still have time to thwart a full-fledged invasion.”

“Invasion?” Sunset asked, aghast. “From what?”

The pair were moving at a brisk pace now, gunning for the residential suites. “We call it the Darkness,” Meta Knight explained. “It’s like a disease upon the universe, existing solely to replicate itself and spread from planet to planet. My knowledge of it is limited to my people’s legends and the tales we have heard from survivors, but I had hoped that they were no more than tall tales.” He seemed to frown behind his mask. “It appears that that hope was misplaced; the stories are generally inconsistent, but a constant among them is that a host’s eyes turn black..”

“So…what does this Darkness actually do?” Sunset asked.

“It is a parasite, forcing apathy upon its host and growing more powerful for it. Eventually, it acts as a drain on an entire planet’s emotion,” Meta Knight said, his voice showing his clear disdain for these creatures. “With sufficient power, it can reduce whole worlds’ wills to the point where its victims no longer care enough to eat. Or drink. Or breathe.”

“Holy shit,” Sunset whispered.

“Thankfully, it seems like it hasn’t reached that point with Popstar, yet,” Meta Knight added as they entered a building. “But if it has taken young Spike as a host, it is likely planning something to gain power.”

Sunset narrowed her eyes. “We need to find it.” After thinking about it for a moment, she continued. “But…we have no idea where.”

“Not exactly,” Meta Knight said as they entered his personal quarters. “I assume you felt that sudden sense of nihilism a few hours ago?”

Sunset blinked. “To be honest, I thought that was just me being a bit more cynical than normal.”

Meta Knight nodded. “I had thought the same of myself, but now I suspect that the Darkness is attacking ambient sources of emotion magic. We shall check the Rainbow Islands first. How fast is your self-levitation?”

“Decent, and I should be able to make it and still have some gas left in the tank afterward. But,” Sunset tilted her head in confusion as Meta Knight made for a safe of some sort, “what are you grabbing before we go?”

Meta Knight entered the safe’s combination and–making sure that he was angled away from Sunset–lifted his mask for a retinal scan. “The object that I believe has shielded us from the worst of the apathy,” he explained. “My personal blade.”

Sunset blinked. “I thought you already had a sword you liked?”

Indeed, he had been holding a sword even as they walked into his quarters, and he had only placed it down directly next to the safe just as he was beginning to open it.

“This is a blade I reserve for only the most extreme of emergencies,” Meta Knight said. “It is a weapon of extraordinary power, passed down from generation to generation. According to legend, an ancestor of mine used it to strike down a series of tyrant kings possessed by the Darkness. It’s been called Darkness’s Bane and the Lightbringer in the past, but its modern name is simple.”

He reached into the safe once it was fully open, pulling out a golden sword. It looked positively vicious, four sharpened prongs jutting out from its sides. Combined with its tip, the five-pronged sword seemed more designed for torture than combat, since a design like that would serve to completely eviscerate a victim.

Meta Knight lifted the sword up, the lighting from above glinting off the orange gem embedded in its guard. “Galaxia.”

As it turned out, even just getting to Cloudy Park was going to be a chore. Only five of their number could fly directly, and Kirby and Gooey weren’t exactly well-equipped to carry someone. Chuchu and Rick had figured out a strange hot air balloon-like tactic to move in the air, so that at least reduced the load down to three. Bandee hitched a ride on Dedede’s back, Coo just kept carrying Kine, and Twilight offered to levitate Nago over.

Of course, that led to its own problems. Gooey, Twilight, and Coo were already the only highly maneuverable fliers, and with Coo carrying a giant fish it left him severely encumbered. And Twilight had to focus on not dropping Nago, so that left the absentminded Gooey as the only member of the group who could quickly dart around in the air.

But even all of that would not have been an issue if not for the conditions around Cloudy Park. For the entire mountain was surrounded by thick, almost black stormclouds, roiling and churning with pent-up energy, just waiting to be released through lightning strikes. Even as they approached, they could see a jolt of electricity arc down from the clouds into the ocean below, sending out a roaring thunderclap that had Twilight reflexively pressing her ears to her head.

Bandee gulped, though the sound went mostly unheard above the cacophony of the storm. “We’ll be flying through that?” he shouted.

“We don’t have much of a bloody choice!” Coo shouted back.

“The storm’s coverin’ bot’ Cloudy Park an’ Dark Castle, at dis point!” Kine added. “Roundin’ it ain’t an option!”

“Plus, if Dedede’s right about Kracko, we’ll have to deal with him first!” Twilight said.

Dedede couldn’t talk, puffed up as he was, so he just nodded instead.

“Ye think the ol’ thunderhead’s got himself possessed?” Nago asked.

There was another crack of thunder, and those that could raise an eyebrow at Nago did so.

“Fair ‘nough,” he conceded. “That’s gonna be a helluva fight, though.”

“Well, Sunset and Kirby have both fought him–and won!” Twilight said, a ghost of a grin crossing her muzzle.

“Yeah, but Sunset had a Fountain behind her,” Bandana Dee reminded. “And Kirby hasn’t fought him with whatever this darkness is!”

Kirby, for his part, turned around just enough to give Bandee an offended look before resuming his hovering at the front of the group.

“It doesn’t matter,” Twilight declared. “We’ll go in there, we’ll fight the darkness infecting Kracko, and we’ll win. And then we can go give the darkness possessing Spike what for.”

“Let’s get a move-on, then!” Kine impatiently called. “Dat darkness ain’t gonna defeat itself!”

With that, the group plunged into the clouds, leaving the open air behind.

Rarity hummed in thought, tapping a hoof to her chin.

“Whatcha thinkin’, Rarity?” Pinkie asked, popping up behind her seat.

A lesser mare may have jumped out of her fur at that, but years of experience from living in the same town as Pinkie Pie had lent themselves to Rarity maintaining her disposition whenever her friend would suddenly appear from nowhere.

So she only nearly jumped out of her fur.

Composing herself in only a moment, she considered her response. “Why, it seems that Twilight is simply acting quite a bit more confident than usual,” she noted. “Though I suppose that may be due to the…events that have transpired over the past month.”

“Nah, Ah think it might be a bit more than that,” Applejack pitched in. “We’ve gone up against world-endin’ threats before, but Twi’s confidence usually takes a hit partway through.”

“But sometimes that’s on purpose, isn’t it?” Rainbow grumbled a bit, levying a glare at Discord.

The draconequus whistled innocently.

“She’s confident because she has to be,” Cadance suddenly said, everypony’s attention turning to her. “Her only other option is fear.”

“And since that wouldn’t get anything done,” Shining realized, “she’s pushing any fearful feelings aside.”

Discord rolled his eyes and snapped, donning a blue outfit with an insignia pinned to his torso. He lifted his paw, separating his four fingers into two groups. “Oh, of course Twiggles would be the one to logic her way out of emotion.”

“It’s a coping mechanism,” Cadance explained. “Twilight’s always had issues with handling stress, so she latches onto the first solution she thinks of like a lifeline.” She sighed. “I tried to help her out as much as I could back when I foalsat her, and it’s not nearly as bad as it could be, but with how high-stress the current situation is and with their emotions being messed with, holding onto her logic probably is the best solution.”

Fluttershy sighed, her eyes turning back to the screen as the group made their way through the clouds. She winced and ducked down as a rumble of thunder rang out from the screen. “I just hope they can get through this…”

“Blimey!”

Coo nearly dropped Kine as he swerved, dodging the bolt of lightning.

“Youse alright up there?” Kine shouted upward after they stabilized.

“That one nearly took my bloody tail feathers off, but I’ll be fine!” Coo responded.

“We have to keep moving!” Twilight called out. “It’s only going to get worse the closer we get!”

Keeping their forward momentum was easier said than done, however. Progress was slow, as their more mobile fliers were limited to the speeds their slowest could move at. Dedede in particular was lagging behind, the strain of staying afloat for so long visible on his face. Rick was struggling to keep his fire breath going at this point, and Twilight wasn’t sure how long Chuchu could keep holding him up. Hay, the wind and rain was doing a number on her own wings as well.

“We’ven’t much further ta go!” Nago pointed out. “Ah think we’re over land by now, we jus’ wanna aim as close ta the summit as we can!”

Just as he said that, something darted out of the clouds. It was too fast for Twilight to properly see what it was, but a flash of green slammed into Rick before any of them could do anything. Just as fast, it vanished back into the lower cloud layer with a puff of gray cloudstuff.

Rick involuntarily let out a cry of surprise and stopped breathing fire, to which both his and Chuchu’s eyes widened in alarm. Before they could fall far, at least, they were enveloped in a violet glow as Twilight extended her telekinesis to them, much to their relief.

The alicorn grit her teeth and tried to maintain her focus. Between the three creatures she was levitating, their combined mass was nowhere near enough to actually strain her, but that wasn’t her main problem. The physical strain of levitating a living creature generally wasn’t an issue for most unicorns, aside from some large exceptions like the ursas and dragons. No, the problem that Twilight was currently facing came from the mental strain, as living things tended to be squirmy and don’t like staying still, thus taking extra focus to keep in her telekinetic field.

And though Nago had finally started to relax, Rick and Chuchu hadn’t been expecting the levitation and instinctively resisted. Given Chuchu’s eight limbs and the stormy conditions, it was taking most of Twilight’s focus just to keep them in the air.

So she wasn’t really paying attention when the group was suddenly buffeted by even stronger winds. Twilight very, very nearly dropped her passengers as the sudden airflow forced her to close her eyes, but she managed to keep ahold of them.

Taking mental inventory and making absolutely sure that she hadn’t dropped anyone, she cast an eye protection charm and opened her eyes. “We need to land!” she shouted over the nearly-defaning wind.

Coo yelped as what looked like an arrow made of clouds shot up from below and slammed into his right talon. Thankfully it was rather blunt and didn’t manage to pierce into his talon, but it still forced the appendage open. With Kine suddenly losing half of his support, he started dangerously swinging, and the fish winced as Coo’s left talon dug a bit into his flesh to compensate.

“Gah!” he shouted. “Watch it up there!”

Scrambling, Coo’s right talon eventually found purchase back on one of Kine’s fins. “I’ll say!” he yelled back at Twilight, ignoring Kine’s protests of discomfort. “Staying up here hasn’t done us a lick of good!”

Twilight nodded in agreement, not wanting to strain her voice much more.

The air around them started spiraling, the sudden gust sending Kirby slamming into Dedede. Both of them lost their concentration on their puffed up forms, with the two of them and Bandee shouting as they suddenly started falling. At the same time, Twilight felt something hard and fast slam into her back, breaking her concentration and sending her scrambling to right herself and catch everyone again.

A few seconds of frantically applying her telekinesis to everything around her and scrambling to stabilize herself, she finally got a good look at their attacker. At this point, she was desensitized to tiny creatures packing large punches, and found herself somewhat unsurprised that the being giving them so much trouble was a tiny green songbird. The darkness within it, indicated by its beady black eyes, had clearly resisted her panicked telekinetic surge, but had stalled it long enough to disorient it a bit before it dove back into the cloud cover.

Quickly, Twilight looked around and her eyes landed on their only mobile flier left as some semblance of a plan formed in her head. “Gooey, keep it distracted while Coo and I find a place to land! We’ll be back up to help as soon as we can!”

She could only hope that Kirby’s new friend understood enough to work with her.

The green thing suddenly moved to try and attack its new friends again, but Gooey had learned its pattern and dove to intercept it! The ~~dream~~ ~~emotion~~ ~~threat~~ nice purple one had said to distract the green thing, so it would! Any friend of ~~the Voidspawn~~ ~~DREAM~~ ~~EXISTENTIAL THREAT~~ Kirby was a friend of its!

The green thing bounced off of it, giving Gooey a kind of tickling feeling. And wasn’t feeling such a ~~horrifying~~ ~~antithetical~~ wonderful new thing! It could feel all sorts of new things thanks to Kirby, like ~~danger~~ ~~drain~~ ~~dispose~~ happiness! But it could also feel sadness, and failing to protect Kirby and his friends would make Gooey sad.

Gooey was pushed backwards by the spiraling winds, but recovered fast enough to shoot out a dark laser at a cloud arrow that the green thing had shot at it. The green thing was moving quickly, though, and used the distraction to shoot forward at Gooey again. As it bounced off of it for the second time, Gooey considered its feelings.

It could also feel other things’ feelings, too. But the green thing felt empty, just like the big purple one with the bag had been. But it also felt like the green thing was trying to convince Gooey of something? It couldn’t quite tell.

Clearly, whatever it was wasn’t working. Gooey felt the same as normal, so it kept on trying to distract the green thing. It called upon the ~~burning inferno~~ fire ability it had stored and shot forward in a fireball, fighting against the buffeting winds and intense rain as it tried to corral ~~its comrade~~ ~~ally~~ ~~SELF~~ the green thing.

It worked! The green thing, clearly concerned for its own well-being, backed off from trying to reach the ground and attack Kirby and friends. Instead, the green thing looked right at Gooey and let out a screech ~~of desperation~~ ~~return~~ ~~control~~ before dive-bombing it again, this time with darkness pooling into a sharpened beak.

Before the green thing could get close, though, a beam of ~~dream~~ ~~emotion~~ ~~DANGER~~ purple magic shot up and knocked it off course. The nice purple one and the big purple one were back!

“Great job, Gooey!” the nice purple one congratulated it. Satisfaction like that was another new and exciting feeling! “We’ll take it from here!”

“Right on, chapess!” Coo called as he shot his feathers at the green bird. It shot back with a cloud arrow, though Twilight couldn’t exactly see a bow for it. Before it could really get anywhere, though, Gooey intercepted it with a darkness laser before bodily ramming it while coated in fire.

Twilight closed her eyes and focused. She had a three-step plan at the moment, dependent on Gooey and Coo keeping the bird occupied. First, she needed to keep it still. Second was exorcizing the darkness from it. And finally, third was using the Element of Magic to destroy the darkness entirely. On paper, simple.

In practice, it was far from simple. The wind and rain were bad enough to break her concentration often, and the constant cracks of thunder just made it worse. But still, with Coo and Gooey’s help (and the former’s constant shouts of encouragement), she eventually got a good grip on the little bird.

Her eyes flew open, shining violet with her Element as she had to exert more energy than normal to keep the little thing still as the darkness fought against her. But, just like the other bits of darkness they had faced, it could do nothing against the might of the Element of Magic, and it was quickly exorcized and destroyed.

With the fight over, Twilight finally allowed herself to relax a bit as the bird recovered, with Coo having gently caught the tiny thing in his talons. That was tough. Tougher than it should have been against such a small opponent, even with how absurd Popstar had been. It seemed that the darkness was getting desperate.

Good. That meant that they were still on track to saving Spike.

Still, all of the action in the rain meant her wings were probably going to be shot again, at least until they defeated Kracko and got this storm to let up. She had enough left in her to land, but she wasn’t entirely sure of her ability to get back up into the air again in this downpour.

Well, at least the green bird was starting to wake up. Maybe it would have a better lay of the land in Cloudy Park and be able to help them towards the summit?

Quickly, it squirmed out of Coo’s talons (though to be fair to Coo, he didn’t seem to be holding it all that hard) and let out a few panicked breaths while its eyes flicked between the three of them. “Who are y’all and where’s my mama?”

By Celestia’s starry mane.

He sounded younger than Spike.

Applejack chuckled as the group escorted the little green bird, who had eventually introduced himself as Pitch after he calmed down a bit, towards the ground where everyone else was waiting. “The little guy’s got some fight to ‘im!” she noted.

Rarity nodded. “Indeed. Though it is concerning that such a young creature was corrupted by this darkness. Given that it went after Spikey-Wikey too, it seems to have no standards!”

Pinkie pouted. “Yeah, this darkness seems like a really meanie-pants! But I’m sure Twilight can take it!”

Curiously, everypony looked at Rainbow, who had been oddly silent during the fight and the subsequent exchange. “Are you alright, Rainbow?” Cadance asked. “You’re usually more talkative than this.”

Rainbow sighed, a sound that Applejack found almost foreign on her. “It’s just…they have to get by Kracko first. Clouds are tough to deal with, and I hadn’t gotten around to giving Twi proper cloudbusting lessons before she wound up in another universe. And the only reason Sunset beat him was because Marx tricked him.”

Pinkie frowned. “But…there’s more of them, now! They can win!”

Fluttershy let out a bit of a squeak and hid behind her mane as another thunderclap echoed out from the screen. “I hope so,” she whispered, nearly inaudible.

“I hope so too, Shy,” Rainbow grimaced. “I hope so too.”

Pitch, as it turned out, was a wonderful resource in navigating Cloudy Park, even in the intense storm. Twilight just wished he wasn’t so insistent on getting directly involved with everything, because he was talking like he was going to take on Kracko himself. It was a level of bluster in someone so young that reminded Twilight far too much of her brother and his own insistence on helping.

She suppressed a wince at her own thoughts. Pitch was new to the group and not Spike; she couldn’t project her brother onto him just because they shared a few similar traits. That was unhealthy and the fact that she almost fell into it indicated that Twilight needed to have a long talk with her brother after all of this was over.

Still, one of the traits Pitch seemed to share with her brother was his ability to get distracted by random inane parts of conversation. Granted, it was a fault of her own as well, but currently it was a bit annoying, because it led Pitch to be perched on her horn and gibbering inanities directly into her ear.

“...so then Ah told Mama that she needed ta get out more, ‘cause-”

“How close are we to the summit?” Dedede cut in, clearly annoyed with how long this was taking.

“Oh, we’re pretty close!” Pitch answered. “But with the clouds everywhere, Kracko could show up whenever he wa-”

He was cut off a second time by a massive crash of thunder, originating from a flash of lightning that was far too close. Slowly, Twilight looked up at the clouds, her eyes focusing in on one spot of them that was far darker than the surroundings. An eyeball, just like how Sunset had described, but jet black. The darkness had infected the entire thing.

“By the stars…” Bandana Dee whispered, awestruck. And not in a good way.

Unfortunately, it seemed that Kracko had noticed them.

Twilight yelped and quickly raised a shield around the group as the living cloud shot out another bolt of lightning. She grit her teeth as it impacted, and she had to sustain the shield for a solid thirty seconds before Kracko finally let up. Outside of her shield, the storm continued to grow more and more intense, and Twilight desperately began to try and think of any sort of plan.

“I might be able to get together enough magic to blast him all at once and get the darkness out of him!” she shouted. “But it’ll take me a few minutes and I’ll be out of commission for a bit afterwards! Who can distract him?”

Nago looked down at his claws and frowned. “Ah dinnae think Ah’ll be much good against the ol’ stormcloud.”

The other groundbound creatures voiced a similar sentiment.

“Ah can take him!” Pitch proudly declared, receiving deadpan stares from the rest of the group.

Twilight frantically looked around at the others. Chuchu and Rick could fly together, but couldn’t attack like that. They were out. Kine at least had a ranged attack while Coo held him, and Kracko didn’t seem anywhere near as mobile as Pitch was, so the two of them might be able to work together. Bandee and Nago were groundbound. Dedede wasn’t very maneuverable, but he was durable enough to take a few hits, probably.

“Kirby’s fought him before…” Bandana Dee mentioned, and Twilight blinked as her gaze fell upon him and Gooey.

It was so obvious! Why hadn’t she thought of it before?

Twilight gathered up a bit of pure mana and forced it out of her body, forming it into a sphere in front of Kirby. “Copy my magic!” she ordered. “You too, Gooey!”

Kirby did so gladly, discarding his fire copy ability and donning the wizard’s hat her magic gave him. Gooey lashed out with its tongue to do the same, but as soon as it made contact it froze and its eyes went wide.

~~The danger~~ ~~threat~~ ~~nice purple one~~ Twilight’s magic was unlike anything Gooey had ever felt before. It was happiness and love and friendship and desperation and sorrow and elation and anxiety and anger and hatred and awe and satisfaction and so many other emotions that Gooey had never felt before. It all came in so strong and so fast that for the first time ever Gooey felt pain.

But that pain was replaced by a cooling calmness almost immediately after. Like it…no, he, Gooey decided, like he suddenly understood the universe. The small feelings he had been having about Twilight and Kirby being dangerous were suddenly gone, replaced by the much more prominent feelings of friendship and acceptance.

He felt alive.

He could still feel his body changing to allow him to use this new harmony magic, the darkness he was composed of reacting and adapting and assimilating. It didn’t feel like it would be exactly like how Twilight used it. It was almost distorted in a way, like it was somehow running on both emotions and apathy. Truly, a strange form of power.

He didn’t know a lot about it, of course–the magic or his copying ability. But who could blame him, he wasn’t even a day old! All he knew was that he could use it, and he would use it with Kirby to buy Twilight time to blast the scary cloud thing!

Gooey’s internal realization on the nature of life only took a moment, and before he knew it he and Kirby were charging out of the shield to confront the cloud.

Twilight resigned herself to simply watch as Kirby and Gooey went up and distracted Kracko, strengthening her shield and focusing as much of her attention as she could spare on gathering up her magic for a massive attack. At the very least, allowing them to copy her magic was letting them more effectively combat the darkness within Kracko.

Kirby ran up first, a blue shield forming from his staff to deflect the bolt of lightning sent his way. He lashed out with a laser of his own in return, though Kracko dodged it by parting his clouds in its path. The cloud’s black eye seemed to seep more darkness into itself from the stormclouds around it, before shooting a black beam directly at an unprepared Kirby.

Gooey dove in front of it, though, a shield of his own forming to defend his friend. Curiously, Gooey’s magic was black as well, and Twilight had to suppress a shiver at how similar it looked to Sombra’s magic. It lacked the usual green and purple flair that dark magic had, though, so she didn’t think it was too much cause for concern.

With a blue flash of light, Kirby crossed his arms and teleported, aiming to physically whack Kracko in the eye with his staff. Before he could do anything, though, there was a giant CRACK of thunder as Kirby was struck by lightning and launched towards the ground. The only thing that saved him from impact was timely intervention on Gooey’s part, as Kirby glowed with a black aura around him as Gooey performed what Twilight identified as low-level telekinesis.

Pretty good for someone who had never even used magic before thirty seconds ago, to be honest.

Kirby collapsed to the ground immediately afterward as the levitation failed, though. Gooey lost his concentration when a particularly strong gust of wind blew him through the air. Regardless of the act probably saving Kirby’s copy ability, but Twilight could recognize that even with the two of them they were still outmatched, and she still had at least a minute left to build up charge. Longer if she had to also focus on defending. “Coo, Dedede, get out there!” she barked, opening up a hole in her shield.

The two were out and in the fight before Kracko could capitalize on her weakened defense. She closed her shield just as a bolt of lightning shot out at it, and she had to split her focus for a bit to endure it.

Dedede bounded all the way up to the cloud level in a single leap, bringing his hammer out of hammerspace on the way. He aimed for Kracko’s eye at the apex of his jump, seemingly believing the cloud to have been distracted with Twilight’s shield. Unfortunately, Kracko was capable of multitasking and retreated his eye into the clouds, leaving Dedede to simply swipe his cloud through some water vapor.

The eye reappeared a few meters over, and the only thing that saved Dedede from getting struck by lightning was Coo grabbing him and dodging the shot. Thankfully, it had bought Kirby enough time to get back up and, with a battle cry, he fired a blue beam of magic directly at Kracko’s eye.

Finally, one of their attack’s struck true, and the cloud actually recoiled from the hit. The storm let up a tiny bit, and Twilight grinned. Twenty more seconds, she estimated. “Keep it up!”

Pitch, who had left his perch on Twilight’s horn as soon as it started heating up with the amount of magic she was gathering, pouted from his new perch on Nago’s head. An impressive feat for one with a beak. “Ah wanted to help.”

Nago chuckled. “Ah think you’re a wee bit too small for that one, laddie.”

Outside the shield, it seemed that Kracko had recovered a bit from Kirby’s shot, but his delay let Gooey get into position to fire a laser of his own at the same time as Coo shot some feathers into the clouds and Dedede leapt up for another hammer strike. All of these were aimed at different locations, so when Kracko dodged Gooey’s attack he manifested his eye directly in the path of Coo’s feathers.

By this point, Twilight herself was glowing with magic, streaks of pure mana leaping from her form to the ground. Everyone else in the shield was doing their best to stay away from her, just in case they might break her concentration. It was a nice thought, and worked well for getting them out of the way for when she released it all. And it felt like she had gathered up enough magic to attack, now.

As soon as Kracko began to recover from Coo’s attack, his eye appearing directly above all of them, Twilight allowed herself to grin. “EVERYONE GET DOWN!”

Immediately, everyone within her shield dropped to the ground, while those outside let themselves fall a bit to get out of the line of fire. Twilight dropped her shield and, before Kracko could react, released the magic.

She didn’t notice it, but her wings were spread wide, her eyes’ sclera were glowing the same violet as her magic, she was floating a bit off the ground, and the Element of Magic was so violently bright it hurt the others to look at it directly.

But no one really had time to notice that, because within milliseconds everyone’s vision was overtaken by the sheer magnitude of the magic Twilight released. Empowered by her own desperation to save Spike and her proximity to her Element, she took her performance destroying one of the Halberd’s wings and outdid it by a factor of ten. The column of pure mana speared upward and slammed directly into Kracko’s eye, and the darkness infecting him could do nothing to prevent the harmony magic from spreading throughout the cloud, systematically destroying any fragment it could find keeping the storm powered up.

The eye itself took the brunt of the attack, which almost instantly destroyed the parasite within. The massive amount of heat released also vaporized the surrounding cloud, reducing Kracko to nothing more than a floating eyeball with a few wisps of water vapor around him. Miraculously, he was still conscious, but with the darkness gone and being so weakened, he clearly decided to cut his losses and fled into the sky.

Half a second later, Twilight cut off the stream of magic and fell to the ground, panting. That was the single most powerful attack she had ever performed on her own, and as her mana levels returned to normal she gazed down at her right forehoof. That…that was a lot.

“Holy fucking shit,” Twilight heard Rick mutter behind her, and she couldn’t find it in herself to really disagree. She had known, intellectually, that alicorns were powerful. Especially Princesses Celestia and Luna. Exceedingly so. The former threw around a star like it was made of cardboard and not a nonillion kilograms of superheated plasma.

But this…this was the first time that it really sunk in for her that she was an alicorn too. Sure, she was nowhere near her mentor’s level, or even as strong as Cadance yet, but she’d ascended hardly more than a month ago. And if she was already capable of all this…

Just how strong would she eventually get?

Twilight shook her head. She could worry about that later. Right now she had a brother to save.

Slowly, she pushed herself to her feet, gazing up at the sky as the storm dispersed. The rest of the group followed suit, looking out across the ocean at their final destination.

There, illuminated by the orange of the setting sun, was Dark Castle. The very sight of it sent a shiver down Twilight’s spine. The shadows cast by the massive spires seemed to twist and undulate, as if brought to life by the sickening powers of the darkness. It was an affront to nature itself, Twilight decided. And it didn’t matter that they would be storming the gates at night, or that the day’s events had definitely taken a toll on everyone. It didn’t matter how tired she was, or that she’d probably overdone it a bit with her attack on Kracko.

All that mattered was saving her brother.

Adeline gasped as her vision was suddenly filled with purple, her hiding spot in Cloudy Park giving her a great view of the fight. But before now, she hadn’t cared about it. She had been visiting when the first wave of apathy hit, and hadn’t felt much of anything since. But when the purple horse creature let off that attack, she was suddenly slammed with an influx of emotion. For the first time in hours, Adeline felt inspired.

And since she had her easel with her, she began to paint.

Author's Note

Pitch, the Lost Bird
Pitch is usually a friendly bird who lives with his mother! But he fell to the Darkness after being separated from her, and now is attacking Kirby and his friends!

Kracko, a Storm Possessed
Kracko's been infected with the Darkness, and it's making him go wild! All of Cloudy Park has been drenched in rain! Save him and Cloudy Park with him!

Happy holidays, everyone! I know it's been a while, but last semester kicked my ass and a lot of my free time was taken up by a) lab work and b) falling headfirst back into the MHA fanfic scene. Still haven't seen the show past Season Three or read the manga at all, but hey, I've read a lot of fanfiction for it.
In any case, I'm glad to be back on writing this! Next semester is the last in my undergrad, and since I've already got basically all of the credits I need to graduate and I've almost finished up what I need to do for my research project, I should have way more free time than last semester (fingers crossed). I will say that I can't promise a consistent update schedule, though, and the next chapter is going to be a doozy, so I have no idea when it'll be out.
I do apologize for any inconvenience with that, but I hope you stay tuned for Chapter Thirty-Two: Storming the Violet Castle!

Chapter XXXII: Storming the Violet Castle

Everypony in Discord’s living room had been stunned silent by Twilight’s display. Aside from Shining and Princess Cadance, they had all seen her attack the Halberd’s wing, but despite being a similar attack, it just couldn’t compare to what they’d just seen. Nothing Twilight had done before, not even when she dealt with the ursa minor attack, compared to this feat. Her friends all needed a moment to process, Fluttershy particularly.

She knew that Twilight was powerful. She’d known from the beginning, when the six of them had rescued Princess Luna from herself. Twilight was strong, a capable leader, and was the most accomplished mage Fluttershy had ever heard of. Of course, as a pegasus from Cloudsdale, she hadn’t heard of many mages to begin with, but she digressed. But to wield magic on such a scale, in combat especially…it reminded Fluttershy of what all six of them could do together with the Elements.

And a quiet part of her, a part that she had hoped had been at least partially compartmentalized away over the past year, whispered that she wouldn’t need them anymore when she got back.

The silence didn’t last, thankfully. It, along with Fluttershy’s slowly spiraling thoughts, was broken fairly quickly by a quiet chuckle from, surprisingly, Discord of all beings. “Ah, Harmony,” he muttered, so quiet that Fluttershy, being the closest and used to speaking quietly herself, thought that she was likely the only one to hear it. “You really know how to pick ‘em, huh.”

Mentally, Fluttershy filed that away. That was yet another instance of Discord mentioning somepony named Harmony. She’d need to ask him about that later.

“What was that, Discord?” Rarity asked, seemingly startled into breaking her own silence.

Discord chuckled again, louder this time. “Just an old draconequus reminiscing about ancient times. Nothing for you to worry about.” He gestured towards the screen, where it looked like Twilight had regained enough of her energy to feel confident moving towards Dark Castle. The group prepared themselves for takeoff, recreating the same arrangement that they had going into Cloudy Park in the first place. “It looks like the action is getting started again.”

Popstar’s sun fully set, and Fluttershy let her previous worries fall to the wayside as she silently prayed that Twilight could save Spike.

The Darkness was annoyed.

This should have been cause for concern, given that the Darkness was ordinarily incapable of feeling any emotions at all. Unfortunately for it, that same annoyance was preventing it from realizing this. Or from realizing why it could feel annoyance in the first place.

The interlopers, including the Voidspawn and the traitor, had defeated its infested cloud golem. Decisively. The only Darkness left on Popstar was itself, traitorous, part of the Voidspawn, or otherwise inaccessible. It could feel the Nebula around somewhere, and it was useful to know where it had disappeared to, but knowing that it was around wasn’t very helpful at the moment.

To make matters worse, the dragon’s psyche was still fighting back! He couldn’t do anything, but it was still a constant strain on the Darkness’s resources to keep him down. Just another source of minor annoyance.

Involuntarily, a growl escaped from the two and a half meter tall dragon’s mouth as the doors to the throne room slammed open. Some of the annoyance slipped away at the sight, at least. There was a proper throne to sit upon!

All the Darkness had left to fall back on now was itself. But that should still be fine. It had destroyed all of the Rainbow Bridges, muting at least some of the planet’s emotion. It had grown more powerful than it ever had been before, and its understanding of draconic biology had reached new heights, allowing for greater manipulation of its host’s form.

After all, its probe into his DNA had finally gotten back to it with the set of genes that controlled greed growth.

It performed another cursory skim of its host’s memories, searching for ways to dissuade the extremely powerful purple one specifically, before landing upon one memory in particular. That of an illusory door, showing the viewer their greatest fear. A bit too dependent on emotion for the Darkness’s taste, but it still gave it an idea. After all, it could still manipulate both the castle and the interlopers' minds.

The Darkness slammed its host’s claws into the castle’s stone floor, the dragon’s sharpened appendages easily piercing directly through. It chipped a couple scales, but that was trivial for the Darkness to heal later. For now, it sent a pulse of itself directly into the building, having grown powerful enough to spread its influence throughout the entire structure.

It should be enough to stop the interlopers, or at the very least weaken them. And with the most powerful entities on the planet dealt with, nothing would be able to stop the encroaching Darkness.

Soon, this planet would belong to it.

As the group approached Dark Castle, Twilight noticed a few things about it that at first seemed relatively unimportant, but that she couldn’t stop her mind from cataloguing anyway. Firstly, the island it was on had seemingly torn itself from the ocean and floated up into the air, and recently at that, if the swirling waters below was anything to go by. Secondly, the bricks were an incredibly dark, almost black violet, giving the entire island an eerie edge to it. Finally, and most upsettingly, the shadows themselves seemed to undulate, but Twilight suspected that that might be the exhaustion finally catching up to her.

When the group landed on the island, Solaria had finally fully set, casting their side of Popstar into twilight. That just made the castle gates even more imposing, but Twilight and her companions soldiered on nonetheless. Her horn glowing brightly with her magic, Twilight telekinetically grasped the castle’s ornate main doors and wrenched them open with so much force it nearly ripped them off of their hinges.

There was no time to waste with Spike in danger, after all.

Immediately, however, the group froze. A sudden chill crept down everyone’s spines, but they only hesitated for a moment before the Element of Magic pulsed. With her eyes narrowed in determination, Twilight stepped forward. The rest of the party followed.

The castle’s interior was just as spooky as the outside. Despite being more than large enough to fit them all, the hallway they were in felt cramped. The torches adorning the walls were lit with violet flames, giving just enough light for the invading force to cast waving shadows. Unfortunately, it was still difficult to see in front of them because of it.

Bandee audibly gulped, his spear already in a ready position. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

Coo, still carrying Kine around, looked ahead. His own eyes were adapted to low light levels, so he could see further than the rest of them. “Now, where would the bugger hide?” he asked in a whisper. The low volume likely wasn’t necessary, but it at least made Twilight feel a bit less uneasy.

“Heh, I know I’d be hangin’ out in the throne room,” Dedede commented. His voice was also lower than normal, but with his usual boisterousness that wasn’t saying much.

Nago scoffed. “Ah dinnae think yer thought process is gonna help us much now.”

As the group reached an intersection, Twilight looked around, confused. There were four hallways converging at this one point, but all of them looked identical. She knew that castles weren’t supposed to be built like this.

“Well, this is just bloody brilliant,” Rick commented. “Which way do we go?”

Gooey, who alongside Kirby had decided to keep the magic copy ability that Twilight had given them, perked up at that, moving himself forward a bit before stopping in the middle of the intersection. Slowly, he turned himself until he was facing the left corridor, and he set off without any fanfare.

The rest of the group looked at each other oddly, but since no one had any better ideas, they followed him.

So, they were relying on the traitor to guide them?

Unfortunate, but the Darkness had far more than mere mazes prepared to deal with the interlopers. No, the forces daring to intrude upon its domain would fall regardless.

Saying that Pitch was ecstatic would be a bit incorrect. He found this entire situation to be, quite frankly, terrifying, but he was excited to be included. His mother had always kept a close eye on him, never letting him venture too far from the nest unsupervised. He didn’t begrudge her for that, of course, but this quest to help save the world was still exhilarating.

It did eat at him a bit, though. Pitch’s mother worked so hard to ensure his safety, and yet here he was on a mission to help save her and everyone else on Popstar. Even though he was one of the few beings that could help at the moment, it felt like a bit of a betrayal of her trust in him.

Those lingering thoughts meant that she was on his mind, though, and he shot to attention when he heard her voice somewhere behind them. It was quiet, but there was no mistaking his ma’s worried tone in the shout of “Pitch!”

Startled, Pitch looked around at his companions. None of them moved like they had heard it, but Pitch always thought that his hearing was pretty good. And it was so dark that he doubted the others would even notice if he left his perch on Nago’s head. It wouldn’t hurt if he quickly flew around the corner they’d just passed to check, right?

He took off without looking back to check if anyone had noticed. Flapping around the corner, he saw nothing, but heard another, further call.

“Pitch, where are you?”

A small, quiet part of Pitch was questioning how his mother had gotten to Dark Castle in the first place, but most of him was focused on finding where the voice was coming from. He flew and flew, following his mother’s voice. After a few minutes, and taking another turn, he suddenly realized that he’d lost track of where the group was.

“Pitch? Pitch, where did you go?”

Never mind that, his mother was close!

Turning down one final corridor, Pitch finally relaxed, seeing his mother’s pink feathers. “Mama!”

“Oh, Pitch, I was so worried about you!” his mother said, beginning to fuss over him.

Maybe it would be alright if he stayed here and let the others go on ahead with the quest. It would be so much easier for him to simply give up and go home.

When he felt Pitch’s weight leave his head, Nago jolted and spun around, catching sight of the songbird just before he turned around a corner. “Dammit, Pitch’s gone.”

Everyone else stopped and turned as well, horrified expressions growing on their faces. “Oh no!” Chuchu cried.

Nago narrowed his eyes. “Ah dinnae know what ‘e was thinkin’, but the laddie ain’t gonna make it far on ‘is own. Ah’ll go after ‘im.”

“Don’t go alone,” Twilight cut in. “That’d just make it easier for the darkness to pick us off.”

“I can join ya, mate,” Rick said.

Before the two of them could set off, though, Twilight cut them off again. “Wait, Rick, you and Nago can smell the best out of us here. If one of us gets lost again we’ll need one of you with the main group to help track them down.”

“Well can any of us see any good right now?” Kine asked. “I’m blind as a bat in here, but maybe one o’ us can help Nago see ahead.”

“Me own night vision is fine,” Nago said. “But if Ah had a helper with it that’d be nice.”

“I can go,” Chuchu offered. “The darkness doesn’t impair my own vision that much.”

Nago nodded at her, and after quickly making sure none of the rest of the group objected, they set off. For ease of travel, Chuchu climbed onto Nago’s back, which didn’t feel quite as strange as he expected. Her tentacles still felt odd gripping his fur, but it wasn’t wet or slimy at all, which part of him had been expecting. With that idle thought complete, Nago set to his task of tracking Pitch.

Said bird, unfortunately, was fast in the air, but the corridors were narrow enough to allow his scent to stick to the floor and walls. It took a solid five minutes of walking and Nago did nearly lose the trail once where Pitch had doubled back on himself, but they eventually turned around one final corner and caught sight of him.

Chuchu gasped in shock at the sight, and while Nago didn’t vocalize anything, he agreed with the sentiment. Pitch was perched on an unlit torch, but he looked out of it. His eyes were unfocused and he only seemed to flap to correct himself if he started to tilt. But most concerning was what was happening around him. There was a tendril of darkness protruding from the wall and wrapped around his left talon. Along with that, he was incomprehensibly muttering to himself, though Nago could hear the word “Mama” said on occasion.

The two of them barely hesitated for a moment, though. Chuchu immediately leapt off of Nago’s back to cling to the wall while Nago himself reached up to swipe at the tendril. His claws sharpened just before they struck, catching on the tendril and dragging it downward. It almost dragged Pitch with it, but Chuchu had clambered up the wall to Pitch’s level. She stuck four of her tentacles to it and reached out with the other four, snaring Pitch and pulling against the darkness.

There was a quick tug-of-war match between her and the tendril before Nago lashed out with his other forepaw and stabbed the tendril directly. That still wasn’t enough to fully release Pitch, however, so Nago braced himself for what would likely be a horrible experience, opened his mouth, and sank his fangs into the weakened point on the tendril of darkness.

Immediately, Nago felt himself involuntarily calm down. His heart rate slowed, and he could feel his claws begin to retract. Part of him wondered why he was even here, why he was trying to fight back against the darkness. It would be so much simpler if he just gave in, stopped fighting back…

Eyes widening, Nago frantically shook his head to try and clear those thoughts away. Thankfully, he still had his teeth sunk into the tendril of darkness, and that, finally, proved to be too much for it. It silently split in two, its remnants retreating into the wall. With the tendril no longer wrapped around Pitch, it was a trivial matter for Chuchu to pull him free as Nago spat onto the ground and frantically ran his paws over his tongue. He didn’t know what that was made of and it was tasteless, but the metaphorical taste it left in his mouth was vile. That lack of feeling, even almost forgetting about Shiro…he never wanted to experience anything like it again.

After he was done, Nago looked back up to where Chuchu was carrying Pitch back down the wall. “He’s unconscious, but breathing just fine,” she said.

Nago nodded at her to show that he’d gotten that before he turned around to watch the hallway. He didn’t know what else might be stalking the halls of this castle, but he wasn’t keen to find out without some warning. “Keep watch until the laddie wakes up,” he said. “Once he does, Ah’ll track us back to the others.”

Chuchu nodded, but as soon as she turned to look down the hallway, she froze. “Uh, Nago…”

Nago turned around to look at her. “Now what is i-”

He froze as well, looking at the hallway that seemed to be deconstructing itself. Stone blocks flew out of the wall, tendrils of darkness tethering them to something in the ceiling. As Nago watched, the tethers seemed to tighten, pulling whatever it was out of the ceiling and towards them.

Immediately, he grabbed Pitch and placed him on his back while he and Chuchu backed up. Two stone feet sprouted out of the ceiling before the block they were attached to completely detached from it, sending the frowning cube with pure black eyes to the floor.

Before them, Nago realized, was a Blocky. One possessed by the darkness and aided by it, given the tendrils sprouting from it holding floating stones that used to be part of the wall.

A Blocky that they would likely have to fight to prevent it from delaying the main group.

Nago sighed. “Cannae we get a break?”

Bandana Waddle Dee was uneasy. Though perhaps that was putting it lightly; saying that he was uneasy was like saying that King Dedede was just a little vain (Bandee may be loyal to his king, but he’ll call it like he sees it). Plus, now that the group was down three members, it made his unease even worse, and the suffocating darkness of the hallways and deafening quiet the group was traveling in had left him desperately gripping his spear.

He was constantly scanning his surroundings, and even the regular clop of Twilight’s hooves were enough to make him jump. The paltry light the violet torches gave off was barely enough to see two meters in front of him, though, so his anxious scanning could barely amount to anything.

Bandee wasn’t quite sure if it was paranoia or pragmatism that led him to scratch the wall with his spear, but at some point around half an hour or so after they had entered the castle, he did so. The wall underneath and a bit to the left of one of the torches now had a long, thin scratch on it. The act had scored him a few odd looks, but he shrugged it off with a “Just making sure.”

Five minutes later, despite walking in a straight line and going up a staircase, Bandee’s scanning caught sight of the wall again. And right there, underneath and just left of a torch, was a scratch in the stonework. He stopped short, and the rest of the group came to a sudden stop with him. “Guys,” he said, concerned, “we’re walking in circles.”

Everyone groaned at that, but Gooey in particular seemed disheartened. Clearly, he’d been confident leading the group, but whatever it was that he was using to tell the way had been tricked.

Honestly, Bandee was still a bit torn on what was going on with Gooey. He was exceedingly similar to Kirby, even having the same copy ability, and seemed just as benevolent. But he’d shown up under rather suspicious circumstances, so while Bandee hated to think the worst of anyone, he was still keeping a close eye on him.

Twilight squinted at the scratch on the wall. “If this was just regular illusion magic I could probably dispel it, but I think it might be messing with our minds directly.”

“How would that send us in circles, though?” Coo asked.

“Well, wit’ da Rainbow Bridges disposed of, the darkness coulda gotten powerful ‘nough ta mess wit’ da castle too,” Kine chipped in.

King Dedede stepped forward, and Bandee moved to the side to let him get closer to the wall. “Well, if that darkness fella is gonna make us go in circles, it best be prepared for us to bust out!”

He grabbed his hammer out of thin air, wound up, and with a massive bang slammed it against the wall. It kicked up a large amount of dust and did manage to crack the stonework, but it didn’t do any meaningful damage. He wound up again for another swing, and after glancing at the rest of the group to make sure everyone stayed clear, he slammed the hammer back down.

This time it shifted the stones making up the wall, and Twilight’s horn flared. Bandee wasn’t entirely sure what she was doing, but he suspected it was something to make sure the ceiling didn’t collapse on them. She did have some experience with that sort of thing, after all. Well, Bandee mentally noted, Sunset had experience holding up collapsing ceilings; Twilight had experience knocking them down.

King Dedede huffed a bit before bringing his hammer back for a third time. “Alright, this time I’ve got it!” The hammer shifted, its interior metal surface becoming the exterior, and its blue flame jutted out. The king began to spin and, with everyone having backed out of the way, he sprang towards the wall, the head of his hammer slamming into it with enough force to bust straight though, filling the hallway with dust.

A flare of violet light, a gust of wind, and the hallway was once again clear, revealing what King Dedede had broken into. Or perhaps out of would be the more accurate term, because the king’s hammer had busted a hole through the wall, beyond which the night sky was clearly visible. Popstar's rings glistened in the moonlight, and Bandee shivered slightly as the chill air washed over him, but he still steeled his resolve.

There was a slight grunt of exertion from Twilight as the stone blocks surrounding the hole were wrapped in her magic and she pushed, widening the opening and sending the stone plummeting to the sea below. Bandana could’ve sworn he heard a splash, even though the whistling of the wind and churning of the ocean should’ve prevented it. Trotting up to the hole, Twilight craned her neck to look up with a frown.

“Gooey,” she asked, “I take it you can…sense, I suppose, where the darkness holding Spike is?”

Gooey made a motion that Bandee guessed was an approximation of a nod. Or at least, as close of an approximation as one could make with no limbs. He then jumped a couple of times, staring up towards the ceiling.

“The bugger’s above us, then?” Coo asked.

Gooey nodded again, emphatically this time.

Twilight took a deep breath. “Fastest way up is to fly. Bandee can stay on my back and I can levitate Rick as long as Coo can keep his grip on Kine.”

“You’ll have no problems from me, lass!” Coo said.

Twilight nodded and crouched down a bit, letting Bandana secure himself on her back as Rick was wrapped in violet light. It was a bit of an odd position, since he had to make sure his feet weren’t in the way of her wings, but it wasn’t the first time this adventure he’d found himself on her back, so he adjusted quickly. As soon as he was secure, the group leapt from the now wide-open hallway and took to the air, making for the top of the castle’s tallest tower.

From their position, they were able to see it clearly. It had a flat top with battlements like a parapet’s all around its edge, and its cylindrical shape made it look almost like a rook. It didn’t necessarily seem practical in Bandee’s eyes, since it was in the center of the castle and if an enemy was within range to shoot at from there, the castle was already lost. But perhaps it was just for the aesthetic; Bandee wasn’t the one to have built Dark Castle, after all, so the original architects may have just had a different vision. It being on an island already made it rather fortified to begin with, so he supposed that it could likely afford some aesthetic design.

Regardless of the castle’s fortifiability, they were advancing at a good enough clip that Bandee thought they’d make it there in a minute, tops.

Of course, they only got halfway there before they were stopped.

And it wasn’t by anything sensible, no. There was no gust of wind that blew them away, or a sudden storm that forced them to land. Instead, the castle itself seemed to shift, the nearest shaded wall (as Lunaris and Popstar’s two other moons were full enough to cast shadows, at the moment) exploding outwards. Bandee quickly had to grip Twilight’s mane as she dove, avoiding a large stone block that the explosion launched at them. She barely wrenched Rick out of the way as well, and had to reach out and telekinetically pull King Dedede away from getting hit too.

“Da heck was that?” Kine shouted from rather far below them, where Coo had dove too.

The shadows warped around where the explosion had occurred (an explosion that Bandee mentally noted had no light or heat to it) and a tendril of pure darkness, undulating like a tentacle of some sort, shot out. Coo squawked as it wrapped around Kine, who let out a muffled cry that Bandee was fairly certain was a curse of some sort. Coo strained and beat his wings harder to try and pull Kine away, but that only caused the tendril to pull back even harder.

Twilight, who had also caught on to what was going on, reacted quickly. She fired up her magic and shot out a beam of violet light, hitting the tendril just shy of Kine. Just like the rest of the darkness, it proved vulnerable to her magic, and it recoiled as if it was burned. Coo sighed in relief and Kine let out a relieved laugh of his own. “Ha! Take that youse darkness bastards!”

Instead of retreating entirely like they had hoped, though, the tendril instead dove straight down, impacting the churning waves with a visible splash. Moments later, a small army of Blippers and Squishies rose from the ocean, and for a moment Bandee was confused. How was a bunch of sea creatures—albeit a large number of them—supposed to stop them when they were dozens of meters in the air?

And then they started congregating together.

Arising from the waves was a giant facsimile of a Squishy, at least twenty meters from head to arm, composed entirely of hundreds of smaller creatures. The Blippers and Squishies were pulling on each other to keep each other up, though Bandee wasn’t quite sure how they were staying out of the water in the first place. Regardless, it was a terrifying image, made worse by the few expressions on the creatures that he could see. They looked completely out of it, blank expressions showing that they likely had no agency in their actions either, having been completely controlled by the darkness.

Twilight attempted to free a few of them with her magic, shooting out a violet laser. It did impact the giant Squishy, and even freed some of the creatures. The light seemed to return to their eyes, and they threw themselves back into the sea and swam away, but it was far too little in the long run. They were quickly replaced by other Blippers and Squishies, and they probably wouldn’t be able to chip away at it fast enough to do much, even if Gooey and Kirby chipped in with their copied magic.

Then it attacked.

The Squishies make up its joints pulled, wrenching up a ginormous arm and swinging at the group.

They scattered as much as possible in the air, given Kirby’s more limited aerial mobility and the fact that King Dedede was still in Twilight’s telekinetic grip. The arm itself turned out to be aimed for Kine and Coo, who dodged with a cry of “Blimey!”

A second swing almost clipped him, only averted by a timely purple laser knocking the tip of it off-course, and Kine looked up at the owl carrying him. “Youse’ve gotta drop me!”

Coo looked at him incredulously, his shocked expression conveying everything he wanted to say without saying it.

“I’m a fish!” Kine reminded him. “I’m better in the water!”

Realization dawned on Coo’s face, though before he dropped Kine, he turned to address the rest of the group as Twilight pulled King Dedede away from another strike. “Princess, you take the others and head up there! We’ll hold this bugger back!”

Kirby frowned at the idea of leaving even more friends behind, but before he could make a sound of protest, Twilight nodded at Coo and turned to start moving towards the tower.

“Wait a sec!” Rick suddenly called out. “Throw me at ‘em too!”

Twilight whipped her head around so fast Bandee had to grab her mane to avoid falling off. “Are you crazy?”

Rick barked out a laugh. “Maybe, but that’s not why!” He pointed down at the giant Squishy, where a giant jellyfish that Bandee recognized as a Master Green was visible, and its movements mirrored the giant Squishy’s! “I can see a big ‘un in the belly o’ the beast! I betcha there’s where the darkness is controlling all of ‘em, and I’m better at gettin’ close than Kine and Coo!” With a shrug, he added, “Plus, I can swim, too.”

“Whatever it is, we’ve got to move fast!” Bandee reminded, pointing with his spear towards the exploded wall, near which the shadows were beginning to move again.

The group acted quickly, with Coo throwing Kine towards the water and Twilight throwing Rick towards the giant Squishy as it raised up an arm to swipe at Coo again. At the same time, more tendrils of darkness shot out from the castle, which were pushed back by three blasts of magic: one from Twilight, one from Kirby, and one from Gooey. Curiously, Gooey’s magic seemed to impact the tendrils a bit differently from Kirby’s or Twilights; for those two, the tendrils of darkness recoiled, while Gooey’s magic almost seemed to destructively interfere with the darkness, warping it as it impacted until it simply disappeared.

“Good luck up there, chaps!” Coo called as he sent a retaliatory series of air cutters towards the giant Squishy.

“Good luck to you too!” King Dedede called back before they took off, Twilight still pulling the king along as he was the slowest of them in the air. Thankfully, once they were back over the building and away from the ocean, the Squishy couldn’t get to them and the attacks from the building itself faded.

Less than a minute later, they had landed, Bandee slipping off of Twilight’s back as they moved over the flat stone roof, looking around. Just like Bandee had thought from a distance, its wall was a parapet, with battlements built into the low wall surrounding the cylindrical tower. Curiously, he ventured over to the edge, peering over the parapet. While most angles would likely be a bit useless, this being the tallest tower did give it a clear shot towards where the Rainbow Bridge would have been, so Bandee supposed that perhaps it did have some sort of defensive purpose and wasn’t purely aesthetic.

Looking back over the roof, he noted that near the back of the tower there was a trapdoor, probably for proper roof access. Unfortunately, it was the only way in, and there seemed to be darkness leaking from it like some sort of eldritch spider’s tripwire webbing. Just looking at it was enough to give Bandee the creeps, and it seemed that the rest of the group agreed.

Sighing, Twilight looked towards Gooey. “I guess that’s the way forward.”

The blue blob gave a hesitant nod, and Twilight lit her horn, her tiara glowing. “Alright, I’ll take point, then.”

The group inched forward, wary of the darkness spilling out of the trapdoor. As they got closer, Bandee could even feel some of his insecurities creep forward, whispering to him that this was all pointless, but he shook his head to dispel those thoughts and stuck closer to Kirby, which seemed to help. Soon, they were close enough now that Twilight decided to properly open the trapdoor.

It was, predictably, trapped.

As soon as she wrenched it open, the darkness spilled out like an oncoming flood, a gooey mass of apathy reaching out and trying to snag them. Twilight and Gooey reacted with magic, successfully protecting themselves, and Bandee was close enough to Kirby that the latter’s mere presence, on top of the magic copy ability, protected him. Unfortunately, though, one member of their group was too far away from the rest for easy protection, but was close enough to get attacked.

“GET IT OFF!” King Dedede shouted, hopping on one foot and frantically shaking the other, which a glob of darkness had latched onto.

Twilight reacted immediately, whipping around as soon as the darkness after her had died down. She shot out a beam of magic, hoping to nail the darkness directly. It moved, though, contorting to avoid it, before launching up and going for the king’s face.

Bandee moved now, but he was too far away, too slow, to prevent the darkness from worming its way into King Dedede. Gooey shot out a magic laser of his own, but it was to no avail. It would have impacted the king’s arm and likely thrown off the darkness again, but Dedede’s arm wrenched itself out of the way with a sickening crack, followed by more cracking as tendrils of darkness wrapped themselves around the dmaged arm, forcing the bones back into place. All the while, his eyes went black.

Twilight looked faintly ill as it happened, but Bandee and the other Dreamlanders had seen maxim tomatoes in action enough to be mostly desensitized to it at this point. Regardless, it was a very bad sign if the darkness had gotten enough power to segment itself and assert control over King Dedede as well. As soon as his arm was back in place, the possessed king moved, clearing the distance between him and Twilight in nary an instant. His hammer was raised and sparking before anyone could really react, and it broke through the hasty shield she erected.

Thankfully, that shield bought just enough time for one of the others to react as well.

In a flash of blue, Kirby teleported directly in front of Twilight, raising his staff and erecting a bright blue shield of his own. Dedede’s hammer hit it with such force that it sent a shockwave spilling out over the rooftop. Kirby and Twilight were fine behind their shield and Gooey managed to stay put under his own power, but Bandee was sent flying, and only saved himself from going over the edge by jamming his spear into a battlement.

It wedged itself under a stone, and he was left hanging by his spear arm over a stars knows how high fall. Grunting, he pulled himself back over the wall, his left arm gaining purchase and that being enough to force himself back onto the roof. He tumbled over the battlement, wrenching his spear out of it in the process and rolling onto the hard stone of the roof.

Looking back up, he could see Kirby and King Dedede engaged in close combat, with every strike of Dedede’s hammer countered by a shield or Kirby physically blocking with his staff. His little hat waved in the wind of each strike, and Twilight chipped in with a magic beam of her own whenever she got a clear shot. Unfortunately, the darkness possessing Dedede was quite adept at avoiding magic, casually snapping the king’s bones or tearing at his flesh to avoid it, before healing it as if nothing had ever happened.

Bandee tore his eyes away from his possessed sovereign to look back at the trapdoor. It was still coated with darkness, and he knew that he’d have no hope of getting through. But…

He looked back at Twilight and Gooey, and to where Kirby was holding his own against King Dedede. “Princess!” Bandee shouted. “Take Gooey and save Spike! Kirby and I will hold off King Dedede!”

Kirby, at that point having just deflected a hammer swing with his staff, punched Dedede in the arm with enough force to snap it and send him tumbling back. He turned back to Bandee for a moment with a resolute expression and gave a determined nod before he returned to battling the king.

Twilight mirrored him. Her expression steeled and she gave a just as resolute nod before she and Gooey beelined for the trapdoor, her horn and crown glowing and sending the darkness recoiling away.

King Dedede, having recovered enough to reengage the fight, ignored Kirby and launched straight at Bandee, beginning the battle in earnest.

Twilight galloped through the halls, just barely behind Gooey, who was leading the way towards the darkness possessing her brother. There were twists and turns in the maze of halls, but thankfully the mysterious blue blob’s instincts pulled through. He led them to a pair of ornate doors, before which Twilight took a moment to inhale deeply. This was it. She would go in there, kick the darkness’s butt, and save her brother.

There were no other options.

Her horn flared, and she let out a snarl that would seem more like a timber wolf’s than an alicorn’s. The doors were both entirely wrapped in her violet magic before she pushed, ripping both giant doors off of their hinges and embedding them in the walls on either side of them.

They were pull doors.

And there, sitting on the throne, was Spike.

Or, perhaps, the thing possessing him.

He looked far taller, even moreso than that red dragon (Her mind was too clouded to really remember his name. Was it Gargle? No, no, it was Garble, right) he encountered back when he followed the Migration. He was lanky, too, all spindly limbs and a skinny torso. His spines seemed sharper than usual, along with his teeth, and his claws almost glinted in the moonlight streaming through the throne room’s large window.

“So, the interlopers have arri-”

Twilight didn’t care what the thing possessing her brother was saying. With blazing fury in her eyes, she cut the darkness off by flapping her wings and launching herself at it, smashing it through the throne it was sitting on and pinning it to the wall. Her magic was so intense around her horn that it was sparking off of it, and the Element of Magic glowed enough to be visible even through that maelstrom. And throughout it, only one thing was on her mind:

“Get the hay out of my brother, you Celestia-damned parasite.”

The wind whipped through Sunset’s mane as she and Meta Knight flew through the air, supported only by their own power. It was honestly freeing to autolevitate for so long; Sunset never would have been able to do this before her mana pool expanded. She was still being careful with it, of course—no loop-de-loops or aileron rolls—but she wasn’t ashamed to admit that she still let out an excited whoop once they got up to speed.

They were passing over an island now, covered almost entirely in trees. There were two large islands on the horizon with peaks extending far above the water, and Meta had told her that Dark Castle, their ultimate goal, was behind them. “How much longer are we in the air for?”

Meta Knight hummed as he flapped again. “At this speed? Ten minutes.”

Sunset grinned. She still had a lot of gas in the tank, so she sped up and set up a timer spell to go with it. “Let’s try for seven, then!”

Chuchu let out a surprised eep as a block nearly slammed down on her, only being saved by Nago quickly snagging one of her tentacles and pulling her out of the way. “That one was too damn close!” he exclaimed as they ran.

“You’re telling me?”

There was another screeching sound as the Blocky shot out more dark tendrils and wrenched more stone from the walls, and Chuchu winced. “This thing’s gonna block our path sooner or later!”

Nago swore under his breath, likely just in case Pitch woke up and could’ve heard. “We’ll have to fight it.”

Chuchu glanced back to see the Blocky still charging them like it had been for the past minute. “Any ideas?”

She made a soft oof sound as Nago unexpectedly passed Pitch on to her before he sharpened his claws and leapt for the wall. They speared in, and he used the momentum to swing around and launch himself through the wall chunks orbiting the Blocky. He bounced from block to block, eventually getting within range to swipe at its feet, tripping it up for a moment.

Nago then quickly retreated, weaving through the now-still wall chunks and gesturing for Chuchu to start running already.

Eyes widening, she turned around and frantically pulled herself along the ground, passing Pitch back off to Nago as he passed for easier movement. Unfortunately, that failed to really do anything, as a wave of dark tendrils rushed past them and slammed into the wall and ceiling ahead of them. They quickly screeched to a stop, both even backpedaling to slow down faster, as the tendrils of darkness pulled and collapsed the ceiling to block off the hallway.

Chuchu looked at Nago humorlessly. “Told ya.”

They turned around to look at their foe, Nago squinting even harder as he protectively curled to obscure the Blocky’s vision of Pitch. “Right, plan o’ attack?” he asked.

Chuchu narrowed her eyes at it. “If we get it next to a wall it ripped a piece out of, I might be able to suplex it through.”

“Better hope it’s an exterior wall, then,” Nago gruffly said. “Hold onto the laddie fer a bit, will ya?”

Nago went back to weaving through the stone blocks, deftly pushing the Blocky further and further back as he advanced. He had to dodge out of the way of a couple of blocks that Chuchu called out for him, but eventually he got it next to a part of the wall that it had ripped up earlier.

Quickly, Nago scuffed a paw against the damaged floor, kicking up some dust into the Blocky’s eyes. He sprinted back while it was distracted, gesturing for Chuchu to give him Pitch. She did, but she was just too slow on land, especially with how tired she was after the day she’d had. “Merde,” she swore. The Blocky was going to recover before she could get to it, but that was still the closest she was willing to get to it while it was throwing around so many heavy objects, especially given that she was the one to hold Pitch while Nago attacked.

And then, salvation came in the form of a little green bird, recently awoken and only slightly disoriented.

Pitch shot forward with a wordless cry, his talons scraping against the Blocky’s already sand-covered eyes to send even more dust into them, sending it stepping backwards once again. And, crucially, it kept that opening open, letting Chuchu sneak up behind it and wrap her tentacles around its middle.

With a mighty heave, she slammed the thing into the weakened wall, sending dust everywhere with a massive crash as the wall crumbled. She let go when she felt herself starting to fall, and thankfully Nago caught one of her tentacles before she could continue after the Blocky, which left her grasp and plummeted towards the sea below.

Guess it was an exterior wall after all.

Nago poked his head out of the new hole in the castle as Chuchu climbed up, Pitch landing on his head with a yawn. “Alright, maybe that,” he yawned again, “was a bit too much for me right after waking up, y’know?”

Chuchu gave him an incredulous look, but Nago, somewhat surprisingly, didn't even respond. He was staring out at the ocean, completely transfixed by something. Curious, Chuchu turned to properly look out at the sea now that the dust had cleared, and her jaw dropped.

What in the world was that?

Rick could’ve sworn that he heard a distant rumble of thunder as he hit the water, but that might've just been the water rushing past his ears. He had a giant sea monster made of smaller sea creatures to deal with. Coo was dealing with attacks from the air and Kine from the sea, so it was Rick’s job to run in there and take out the jelly running the show.

Or, well, take out the jelly that the darkness was using to run the show, but he digressed.

Unfortunately, that was looking to be a bit difficult at the moment. With how the giant Squishy’s arms were structured, actually running in there to reach the Master Green at the center was going to be a nightmare. But it was a nightmare he’d have to try and brave.

Quickly, he swam forward, shooting Kine a quick nod as he darted in and out of the amalgamation’s arms, dodging both blunt hits and what looked like quick shocks that the Master Green was sending through.

Ah, that would be a problem.

Eventually, Rick latched onto one of the creature’s arms by way of physically ripping a Blipper out of the formation and inserting himself in. It definitely hurt, especially since the surrounding Squishies and Blippers were doing their damndest to make him as uncomfortable as possible, but he still shimmied forward, trying to get to the center.

He didn’t make it very far before the entire arm just ceased to be, the Squishies and Blippers making it up exiting the formation en masse and letting Rick plummet back into the water. The arm then quickly reformed above him, and he yelped and dove to avoid getting hit (and possibly shocked). It still nearly clipped him, and it was only Kine quickly swimming in and pushing him away that kept him from getting a nasty bruise.

“Climbin’ up the bastard’s arm ain’t gonna work!” Rick disgruntledly shouted, mostly to himself as Kine was already swimming off to keep more of the creature’s underwater arms occupied. After a moment of pondering, he got an idea. Quickly, he swam up to the surface to shout, “Coo, mate, come down ‘ere a moment!”

Thankfully, his shout was loud enough to carry over the wind, and after Coo sent another series of aerial cutters to sever another of the creature’s arms (which it would then have to dedicate finding more Blippers and Squishies to replace) he dove down. “What is it, Rick?”

“I need ya to carry me up an’ chuck me at the center o’ it.”

Coo, at this point, was rather desensitized to having been asked to throw his comrades, and he dutifully picked Rick up in his talons. He grunted a bit as he took to the air, though. “My, Rick, you might want to lay off of the seed for a while. You’re heavier than Kine!”

Rick, who was already starting to turn some of his fur into rock in preparation, just chuckled. “Dontcha worry! It’s all part o’ the plan!”

Coo flapped harder, focused on one of the arms above them. “Well, I hope your plan’s ready!”

Coo flipped himself over to give the maximum possible power to his throw just as Rick fully curled up into a ball, sending him spinning towards the Master Green controlling it all. During his flight, he could catch a glimpse of the arm from before bearing down on Coo, who just barely managed to dodge away using further momentum from the spin.

Meanwhile, Rick finished hardening his stony shell just in time, as he slammed hard into the layer of Blippers between the Master Green and the outside. They parted before him, letting him uncurl and shoot a ball of fire right at the particularly annoying jellyfish. It brought a few of its tentacles up to block, moving the Squishies and Blippers outside erratically and coincidentally lining up an easy shot for Coo’s feathers.

Rick didn’t let up on the offensive after the fireballs, though. He rushed forward, stepping on a few Squishies as he did so, to ram directly into the Master Green while still covered in stone. That seemed to do the trick, as it finally dislodged the Master Green from the Blippers it had wrapped itself around and forced it out the back of the facsimile of a giant Squishy. As Rick and it fell towards the water together, the entire structure began to dissolve behind them, as Blippers and Squishies fell into the water as one, freed from the control of the darkness.

The Master Green, though, was very much still aggressive, and Rick knew that as soon as they hit the water it would have the upper hand. He could still swim rather well for a hamster, sure, but he was dealing with a jellyfish, here; he was just outmatched.

Kine, however, was not.

As soon as they were underwater, Rick swam as hard as he could away from the Master Green as Kine rushed in, ice already forming around him in an attack pattern. The jellyfish tried to shock him, but whenever it fired up any sort of shock, Kine just interposed a sheet of ice to stop the current short.

The Master Green was pummeled with ice spike after ice spike, its tentacles getting more and more tangled with each strike. Soon, Kine had twisted it around so much that it was completely stuck, and he knocked it unconscious with a single strike of his tail.

Hopefully, that would be enough to keep it down until this entirely darkness situation was solved.

Rick and Kine nodded at each other before making for the surface, where Coo greeted them. A cry of “Yoo-hoo!” from the castle drew their attention upward, and Rick blinked in surprise at what he saw.

Standing in a hole in the castle wall (a different one from the one that they made earlier) were Chuchu, Nago, and Pitch! The former jumped down to let Rick properly get up there, while Coo picked up Kine and flew up to join them.

Soon, they were all standing on solid ground again. “So,” Pitch started, “how do you think the others are doing?”

At that exact moment, the top of the tallest tower of Dark Castle seemed to almost explode with power, the wind even being felt by them all the way down on the lowest floor.

“What the blazes was that?” Coo called. Quickly, though, he narrowed his eyes. “Wait a moment…something’s coming towards us!”

Bandee yelped and dove to the side, just barely dodging King Dedede’s hammer strike. He retaliated with a jab from his spear (he knew that his king could take it) and before Dedede could counter, Kirby teleported in. He raised a blue shield protecting Bandee from the next hammer swing, which bounced off of it, and took the time to ready a solid punch to King Dedede’s gut.

Dedede saw it coming, though. Acting quickly, he swung all the way around to target Kirby’s other side, and the punch connected at the same time as his hammer swing. Both were powerful, the former launching the possessed king back a few meters, and the latter snapping Kirby’s staff in twain, vanishing his copy ability and thus, his hat and magic. Kirby let out a cry of surprise and a bit of pain as he fell back next to Bandee, while Dedede slid to a stop by planting his hammer’s handle onto the stone roof.

Then the flap opened and the missiles started firing.

Bandee, surprised, made sure that he was behind Kirby at that point. The pink ball, who by now Bandee was very, very glad was on their side, simply opened his maw and ate the missiles, swallowing them and becoming a pink missile himself.

Stunned, Bandee just blinked at the weapon that Kirby had become. That was a new one.

The missile fired, and before Bandee could blink and definitely before Dedede could move, it had hit its target. The possessed king grunted, though he didn’t indicate any further pain, but now Kirby was up close and personal. Even without a copy ability, the pink ball was still strong, and he launched another punch at the penguin.

Dedede dodged it by jumping up, though, and as Bandee tracked him he realized that he’d land right next to him. He dodged again, but this time he was ready for it, and when the hammer came down (and cracked the stone!!!) he had his spear ready to sink into his king’s hammer arm with a mental apology.

It did go in and managed to draw blood (which, by now, was a goopy, black substance that made Bandee viscerally uncomfortably just looking at it), but Dedede quickly wrenched his arm away, snapping the spear in two. Bandee, for a moment, looked down at the now useless stick in his hands and frowned. Or, well, frowned as much as a Waddle Dee could.

The tip of his spear ejected itself from the king’s arm as the darkness worked to heal him, but it was enough of a delay for Kirby to catch up again. This time, he jumped up and decked Dedede across the face, sending the king sprawling for a moment. Just for a moment, though. He did a backflip to get back up.

It was the single most athletic thing Bandee had ever seen his king do and he wasn’t even at the wheel at the moment.

As soon as the king was back on his feet, though, he retaliated. He swung his hammer hard at the puffball, who just barely managed to jump out of the way. Kirby inhaled some of the debris it kicked up to spit back at him, at least, which seemed to annoy the possessed king a bit.

Bandee’s eyes narrowed. Shouldn’t the darkness not even be able to get annoyed? They'd been feeling apathy when the bridges were destroyed, after all. Maybe King Dedede was fighting back!

He needed something to distract the darkness with, though, and Kirby probably needed to get another few solid hits in before anything Dedede could do mentally would help. Glancing down at his right arm, though, Bandee got an idea.

Once Kirby dodged the next overcommitted swing from the possessed Dedede, Bandee took the time he was recovering to throw the remains of his spear with all his strength. He didn’t quite mind losing the weapon, at least. Not as much as he would have a month ago. After his experience with his spear breaking on the Halberd, he’d started carrying extras.

Plus, his throw struck home by clocking Dedede right in the head, distracting him just long enough for Kirby to wind up another jab to his face. Or he would’ve, had the king’s arm not wrenched itself out of place again with another series of disturbing cracks to catch the blow.

Slowly, the possessed king turned his face to look at Kirby, his eyes leaking pure darkness like bloody tears. His belly seemed to warp, flesh and clothing melding into one as a thin line grew across it, opening into a single, intimidating eye.

Bandee felt sick at the sight of it.

The being that was using King Dedede as a vessel roared, sending a blast of air out in all directions. Kirby stood his ground, but Dedede’s hammer was caught up in it and slammed into him. Bandee, on the other hand, was sent flying once again, but this time he hadn’t gotten his spear out prematurely and really was sent flying over the parapet with a startled scream.

He, thankfully, wasn’t left out in the air for long. A couple seconds after he was sent flying, he was caught by a familiar pair of talons surrounded by purple feathers.

“Almost missed you there, mate. That’d’ve been a bloody shame.”

Bandee was relieved, but he certainly didn’t relax. “Thanks, Coo. But I need to get back up there; the darkness got to King Dedede!”

Bandee couldn’t see Coo’s expression, but he imagined it was steeled. “The others are on their way up, too,” he said as he took off for the tower. “What exactly happened to Dedede—BLOODY HELL.”

That about summed up what was going on on the roof. Kirby had definitely inhaled Dedede’s hammer at some point, since he had a little wooden hammer himself, along with a headband. He was going blow for blow with the darkness-infested Dedede, who at this point was just floating with an eye staring out of his belly and shooting balls of darkness. Because why not, right? Bandee wasn’t even sure how this could get much more surreal.

Oh, maybe that would do it.

“That” being the eye closing before becoming a stars-damned mouth and attempting to fly at Kirby while chomping. Bandee didn’t even have words for how utterly terrifying that very concept was, let alone seeing it play out before him.

Thankfully, he didn’t need words for Coo to throw him directly at the possessed king spear-first. His new spear sank into Dedede’s arm again (ignore the blood ignore the blood IGNORE THE BLOOD), and the creature possessing him let out another roar. It couldn’t do anything, though, since Coo immediately chipped in with some air cutters.

Pitch was the next one to show up, but he didn’t engage. He seemed unwilling to fight the possessed king directly, instead circling the edge of the tower to make sure nothing got out. Bandee couldn’t really blame him.

By the time Chuchu and Rick hovered their way over the edge, Bandee and Coo had successfully forced the possessed king to the ground, letting Kirby get another swing in with his hammer. The darkness had given up the whole mouth thing, thankfully, instead going back to a single, unblinking eye. Dedede’s actual eyes were still leaking blackness uncontrollably, though, and the darkness was still fighting back something fierce.

But then everyone took a turn whaling on him. Bandee struck his other arm with his spear, Coo shot out some sharpened feathers, Rick came out of nowhere as soon as he was on the roof and slammed into him while curled into a ball and covered in rock, Chuchu followed him and suplexed Dedede, and finally Kirby hit him one final time with his hammer.

That, finally, proved to be too much for him, and Dedede fell properly unconscious, with the darkness fleeing from him and making a beeline for the trapdoor.

Panting, everyone sat down other than Coo and Pitch, who just landed. “Can we, uh,” Bandee said between pants while fetching a maxim tomato to stuff down King Dedede’s throat, “wait a sec before going to help Twilight?”

Kirby looked between the assembled animals, a bit confused.

Coo blinked. “Oh, Nago and Kine are still down on the first floor. They’re trying to find the actual exit.”

Kirby nodded, and silence once again took them.

For all of ten seconds, before the roof exploded.

Twilight let out a cry of pain as a sudden shock ran through her system, and she launched herself backwards on reflex. The puppeteer controlling Spike pushed off of the wall, some sparks of electricity still dancing between his claws. It tilted Spike’s head curiously. “Oh, but Miss Sparkle,” it said matter-of-factly, “your brother is already gone.”

It was lying.

It had to be. It was too casual, almost smug in how it said that. It had to be bluffing.

She did not even for a moment consider that Spike may have actually been subsumed by the darkness.

It was simply. Not. Possible.

Instead, she focused on the sparks jumping between his claws. “What did you do to him?” she growled.

The darkness seemed to process that for a moment before realizing what she meant. “Ah, I simply rearranged some of the silicon within the dragon’s body. Bioelectrogenesis is a rare trait; I think I’ll hold on to this vessel for some time.”

A black laser speared out from behind Twilight, indicative of Gooey helping out. Before it reached the darkness, though, a piece of the floor ripped itself out to block the blow. The stone retreated soon after, and that darkness’s black eyes zeroed in on Gooey.

“Ah yes,” it said, “the traitor.” It turned to look Twilight straight in the eye. “Are you aware, Miss Sparkle, that this…thing was originally an extension of myse-”

“Oh shut the hay up,” Twilight interrupted, grabbing Spike’s body in telekinesis and locking his limbs in place to keep it from moving. It took a lot more power than it usually would, but Twilight wasn’t paying much attention to her mana levels at this point. She just wanted this whole thing over with. “He’s on our side now, anyway.” The darkness tried to shoot out a stream of black fire in retaliation, but Gooey quickly jumped in, his own magic destabilizing whatever the darkness was using.

As soon as it was over, Twilight had a clear shot with the Element of Magic. She aimed and prepared to fire, when…

SNAP

An extremely loud sound and sudden movement from Spike broke her concentration. He fell to the ground as her telekinesis wavered, his right leg giving out as soon as he hit the ground. It was quickly wrapped in tendrils of darkness, though, the darkness working to heal his broken leg so fast that he could stand again almost immediately.

“Sudden movements can break telekinetic control,” the darkness quoted, a quote that Twilight recognized as one she had once told Spike. “It’s why levitating living things is often so much more difficult than nonliving things. Your magic is truly quite versatile, but you have often told your brother where your weaknesses lie.”

Twilight’s eyes widened. If it had enough of Spike’s memories to know that, then…

“Yes, Miss Sparkle,” the darkness said, “Equus is a powerful world on its own. It must be possible to get there, somehow, and it will be a valuable world to assimilate following Popstar.”

Twilight let out a wordless shout of rage, sending a beam of magic spearing the darkness’s way. It bent over backwards in Spike’s body to dodge it, performing a limbo move that Twilight knew her brother wasn’t normally capable of.

There were no more words spoken, as the darkness continued to warp and distort Spike’s body in unnatural ways to attack. His left claw, sparking with electricity, extended towards Twilight along with the entire arm, stretching out to several meters in length. She quickly erected a kinetic shield within a conducting shield, allowing the electricity to ground and blocking the physical claw strike moments after.

Gooey flew in after that, sending another wave of magic the darkness’s way. Similar to how the piece of it within Dedede dodged, the darkness bent Spike’s extended arm away with a sickening crack. The black beam of magic (that still gave Twilight slight shivers to look at, but if Gooey was physically once part of the darkness that did explain quite a bit) sailed clean through, with the arm bending in an arch above it.

Twilight felt ill just looking at the situation, but she had to fight through. For her brother’s sake.

“I know you’re still in there, Spike!” she shouted as the darkness pulled Spike’s arm back to how it was previously and she stopped wasting energy on the shield. “Fight back!”

The darkness seemed to twitch a bit at that, and Twilight could feel it in her bones that her plea did something, at least. The darkness grit Spike’s teeth, black flames leaking from the sides of his mouth, before a ring of purple scales, so sharp that they glinted in the firelight of the room, exploded off of him level with Twilight’s neck.

She quickly took to the air to avoid them, but it turned out that that attack was just a distraction, for the darkness had extended both of Spike’s arms. One was aiming for her and the other was for Gooey, but in at least Twilight’s case it ramped the body horror up a notch. Spike’s palm now had teeth. And not only that, but it seemed to be able to shoot fire as well, if the building black flames meant anything.

Twilight yelped and snapped her wings in, falling the couple meters to the ground and allowing the fire to shoot over her head. When it hit the opposite wall, it started eating through it like acid, complete with the wall sizzling, so Twilight really didn’t want to find out what would happen if it hit her.

Gooey, at least, could counter the flames with magic of his own, but she wasn’t sure how long that would last. Kirby’s copy abilities (and wasn’t that an interesting thought—could Kirby himself somehow be related to the darkness? Wait, no, now was not the time to be hypothesizing!) seemed somewhat fragile, and Twilight suspected that if Gooey took one solid hit that might be enough to break it.

Sure enough, that hit came rather soon. The darkness retreated the extended arms like one of Rarity’s mechanical tape measures, and as soon as they were back next to Spike’s body, it broke both of his legs. It wasn’t a clean snap like it had been breaking his bones before, though; it seemed to augment the muscles enough that the bones just couldn’t take it. Even mid-leap, though, the darkness was quickly healing Spike’s legs. It leapt forward towards Gooey, and before either him or Twilight could react, it had sunk Spike’s fangs into the blob.

It shook the poor thing repeatedly like a dog trying to snap its prey’s neck. Gooey, thankfully, had no bones to break, but he still looked like he was in pain and he quickly lost the magic that he’d copied off of Twilight.

All the while, a selection of scales on Spike’s left shoulder blinked. They had transformed into a myriad of eyes, watching Twilight to make sure she didn’t interrupt before the darkness had finished Gooey off.

She, of course, interrupted anyway.

Twilight, with her magic flaring intensely, charged forward. The darkness attempted to raise a section of the floor again (had it fully incorporated itself into the castle as well? That’d explain the shadow tendrils from earlier), but this time Twilight was prepared. Before she released her cleansing magic, she sent an explosive spell out first, blowing the stone to smithereens and letting her jump straight at the possessed form of her brother.

That seemed to actually surprise it for the first time all fight, and it quickly let go of Gooey and whipped around to try and release a stream of flame at her. Purple magic met black flames, and struggled in midair for only a moment. Twilight’s magic quickly pushed back against the darkness, slamming into Spike and sending him careening towards the wall.

It slammed into it, sending a dust cloud up and obscuring Twilight’s view of it. Gooey, at least, was recovering quickly, and he joined Twilight in warily staring at the cloud of dust and debris.

It started to fall, revealing Spike’s snarling form, with flame licking his cheeks and sparks dancing between his claws. It might have been a trick of the light, but Twilight was sure that he was a bit taller than before, as well. She prepared herself for another bout, putting herself in a ready stance and preparing her magic.

And then the window shattered.

“Six and a half minutes, baby!”

An aquamarine blur streaked down from the destroyed window to Spike as Sunset slammed into him full-force, sending the darkness straight through the wall and into the next room. Landing, she finally let go of her autolevitation and grinned at Twilight. “The cavalry has arrived!”

Meta Knight swooped in after her, landing in the throne room while avoiding the many shards of stone and glass that now littered the area. He had a new sword that Twilight hadn’t seen before, a golden blade with some nasty-looking prongs sticking off of the sharp ends. It looked more like a torture device than a sword, but the orange gem embedded in its hilt gave of an aura of magic that only intensified as he pointed it at the darkness, which was clawing its way back through the hole in the wall.

“Begone, foul creature,” Meta Knight said, his mask and tone truly giving off the feeling that he was living up to the second half of his name. “This planet is under our defense.”

The darkness growled in response, and suddenly a pulse of darkness ran through the floor, centralizing on it. As soon as the darkness had absorbed another part of itself (Twilight guessed that it was probably the part that it had split off to infect Dedede), Spike’s left arm suddenly doubled in size. His spine stretched, cracking as it did, and the rest of him started to swell as well. With a start, Twilight realized what was going on.

Greed growth.

“You utter fool of an Astral,” the darkness said, Spike’s voice dropping as he continued to grow, “this planet is mine!”

Spike’s form reached the ceiling and, unable to take the pressure, it exploded outwards.

“Don’t eat me, ya damn cat!”

Nago just let out a huff at Kine as he kept trotting through the hallways, looking for the exit. He wasn’t exactly well-equipped to carry him any other way than with his mouth, as the fish didn’t fit on his back the same way Pitch had. Plus, he didn’t hunt sapient things anyway; he was a cat, not a monster.

Suddenly, the entire castle shook.

Both Nago and Kine looked around warily. “Da heck was dat?”

There was a giant crash, like an unstoppable force hitting an immovable object, and the already weakened castle couldn’t take it anymore. The ceiling of the hallway Nago and Kine were in tore itself from the walls, spinning away into the sea with a mighty crash, exposing everything going on in the tower to the two of them.

Nago’s jaw dropped, dropping Kine with it, but for once the fish didn’t complain.

Whatever was going on up there was more important.

Bandee was honestly getting sick and tired of being thrown from towers, and it had only happened thrice so far today.

Thankfully, he was saved once again, though this time not by Coo; the owl was too busy dodging falling rocks and bits of destroyed castle alongside Pitch for him to really help. Instead, Twilight teleported in and caught the lot of them with her magic, the familiar feeling of her telekinesis washing over him.

Now that his world wasn’t spinning (again), Bandee took in what was going on. Twilight seemed to be straining herself, but only slightly; the Element of Magic was glowing brightly and probably helping her out. The tower, on the other hand, hadn’t handled the stress of the situation nearly as well.

It just didn’t exist anymore, except for a single section of wall between them and what looked to be a giant purple dragon.

Was that Spike? What the heck had happened to him?

His eyes were still black, and beginning to leak like what had happened to King Dedede. He let out a piercing roar, and Bandee reflexively covered his ears. Spike’s spines, which were curving out and down and looked incredibly sharp, dulled a bit, and he shot a column of black flame out towards Twilight.

Thankfully, an aura of aqua magic wrapped itself around his snout (Sunset was here too?) and forced the attack downwards a bit, so the fire hit the remaining wall of the tower, rather than them.

The wall didn’t last very long, revealing the rest of the battle to Bandee.

Sunset was on the ground, her horn alight with so much magic that Bandee could clearly see it even from so far away. Gooey was with her, and given the black bolts that he was firing, he either still had Twilight’s magic copied or had copied Sunset’s. Finally, a winged figure darted around Spike, a flash of gold countering every claw strike the dragon tried to make.

If that wasn’t Meta Knight, Bandee would eat his bandana.

Eventually, though, Meta must have made a mistake, because the darkness possessing Spike got the upper hand and backhanded him away. Meta Knight was still flying, at least, but it would take a few seconds for him to get back. A few seconds that Spike could use to attack Sunset and Gooey.

He raised up a giant claw, electricity sparking around it (since when could he do that?), and Twilight reacted quickly. She shot a beam of magic at Kirby (who had lost his hammer ability when the roof exploded), who thankfully got the memo and inhaled it just as Twilight teleported the lot of them. It was a feeling foreign to Bandee, but it was still certainly a more comfortable feeling than being inhaled.

They reappeared on a floor that had certainly seen better days, in the remains of what Bandee assumed had been the throne room ten minutes ago. Spike’s claw was coming down, but Twilight’s and Sunset’s horns lit up in a display so bright that Bandee had to look away. A spherical shield with four colors to it—violet, aquamarine, black, and blue—appeared above them just in time, as Spike’s sparking claw hit it with a violent crash.

His claw held.

The shield held.

Twilight, Sunset, Kirby, and Gooey held.

The castle did not.

The exchange had finally proved too much for the structural integrity of much of the castle, and the tower and surrounding areas finally collapsed in the explosion. The air pressure from the attack alone ripped the roofs from much of the rest of it. They were safe inside the shield, which turned out to be a complete sphere that all of them were inside, but Bandee could only hope that Nago and Kine weren’t caught up in the collapse.

Twilight, her Element and magic both still glowing, teleported out of the shield and into Spike’s face. “Spike!” she shouted so loudly that Bandee could hear it even dozens of meters below. “I know you’re in there! Keep fighting this!”

Deep within Spike’s psyche, a flame that the Darkness had almost, almost snuffed out fired up again.

Meta Knight caught back up, sinking Galaxia into Spike’s right arm between his scales. The magic within his sword worked quickly, forcing the Darkness back and giving the drake control over his arm once again.

The knight looked back up at the possessed dragon, and he couldn’t help but smile beneath his mask. The darkness had stopped dripping from his eyes, and there were even specks of green showing through. It was unexpected, but Meta Knight was quite happy with this result. The child didn’t deserve to go through this, but it was good to see that he was fighting back.

GET.

Sunset narrowed her eyes. Spike was tough, and she did have full faith that he could fight back, but he could probably use a little help. Seeing that his left arm was beginning to curve back to attack Twilight again (though slower this time), Sunset also teleported out of their shield while straining to maintain it. It was tougher to maintain a bubble shield while outside of it, but it would probably be harder on her to keep maintaining it and also shoot a spell through.

Her horn ablaze, Sunset directed a beam of magic at Spike’s left shoulder. She had seen Twilight go with pure magic attacks against the Darkness, so she hoped that it was an all magic thing and not just an alicorn or Element thing.

Thankfully, her gamble paid off, because the Darkness seemed to lose control of Spike’s left arm as soon as her magic connected, and his eyes seemed just a bit more green.

She grinned. “You’ve got this, Spike!”

OUT.

“Keep it up, Spike!” Bandee shouted, hoping to help at least somewhat. Kirby and Gooey joined in cheering for him to push back the darkness, and soon enough everyone conscious within the shield was shouting for Spike to keep fighting.

OF.

Within Discord’s living room, everypony was on the edge of their seats, all shouting for Spike to push back the darkness, as if he could hear them.

“C’mon, Spike,” Shining Armor whispered. “You’ve got this, bro.”

MY.

Twilight teleported again, avoiding the snap of Spike’s jaws and standing on his snout. She stared directly into his eyes, eyes that were slowly returning to being Spike’s. The black was starting to fade away, more and more of Spike’s natural green returning to the surface.

Twilight’s horn was once again lit in a blaze of fury, the Element of Magic glowing such a vibrant purple that it was shining even on Spike’s own purple scales. Slowly, she walked forward on Spike’s snout, getting ever closer to his eyes.

“It’s me, Spike. Your sister, Twilight,” she said softly, despite the maelstrom of magic swirling around her. “Come home, Spike. Please.”

HEAD!

Twilight released her pent-up magic at the exact same time as Spike finally, finally reasserted some control over himself, pushing the Darkness back and viewing the world through his own eyes for the first time since the day before. His mind was still clouded with greed (take take TAKE) but he pushed that aside in the lucid moments he had before his biology would take over. Twilight was here. Twilight had come to save him. Just like he hoped she would.

The sheer relief he felt, combined with the Element of Magic firing, seemed to finally be the final straw for both the Darkness and his greed growth, and something forced itself out of him as he shrank. Just like when he had ended his rampage through Ponyville after his tenth birthday, he shrank all at once, snapping back to his usual form but drawn up into the air by his head.

Before he could even fall a meter, Twilight caught him, and he instinctively drew into her forelegs. Peering back at the Darkness, he finally got a good look at what had possessed him.

It wasn’t particularly tall, maybe a meter from end to end at most. It was made of two segments: a lower, spherical portion surrounded in a wavy cloak of darkness, and an upper portion with hair-like protrusions, all still made of the same material. A single, small eye was visible in the upper portion, its positioning making it seem like it was glaring at them.

It fled upwards into the sky, and Meta Knight quickly shot past them in pursuit. Kirby was close behind.

There was a flash of violet light, and suddenly Spike, along with Sunset, Twilight, Bandee, and a number of creatures he didn’t know, were teleported back down to the ground outside of the castle’s entrance. Spike would’ve stumbled out of Twilight’s embrace, but he was so tired at the moment that he didn’t even try to resist his sister’s hug. Had he the strength at the moment, he would’ve been hugging her back, too, anyway. Plus, Spike’s memories of the past several hours were still a bit fuzzy, but he was pretty sure that the Darkness had done something important that he needed to remember…

His eyes opened wide. The Rainbow Droplets!

Squirming, he forced himself out of Twilight’s embrace (much to her dismay; she seemed to be trying to convince herself that this was real, that Spike was okay) and started forcing himself to cough, slamming his fist against his chest and trying to summon up just a bit of his green messenger flame.

In only seconds, he hacked up the flame, which coalesced into seven colored droplets, clattering to the ground in front of them. Desperately, he locked eyes with his sister. He didn’t know why, exactly, he said what he said next, but he could feel it in his heart that one being, in particular, needed to finish the job.

“Get these to Kirby,” Spike rasped.

Sunset seemed to want to speak up, but her horn sparked and she winced. “I don’t think I can,” she said. “I don’t want to risk mana burn with everything being so new. It's up to you, Twilight.”

Twilight frowned, but grabbed the seven Rainbow Droplets in her magic and nodded resolutely. “Stay safe, Spike.”

He smiled, even as blackness was starting to creep around the edges of his vision and he could feel his consciousness fading. This day had been so tiring and his body screamed at him to just collapse on the spot and fall asleep. “Kick its butt, Twi.”

Twilight huffed at that, but didn’t reprimand his slightly crass language. She took off with a mighty flap of her wings, and as she disappeared into the sky, Spike finally let unconsciousness take him.

Of course the bastard had to have a sword hidden in that cloak, too.

The Darkness’s blade and Galaxia clashed against each other, both experienced swordsmen trying and failing to disarm the other. Meta Knight hadn’t dueled against another sword user like this in…ever, really. He couldn’t recall any of the few other Astrals he grew up with being able to keep up with him, and the last member of his family that had as great care for the family tradition as he was Luna Knight. And by the time Meta was proficient enough with a sword to possibly duel his great-great-great grandmother as an equal, she was on her deathbed.

Astrals were a rather long-lived species, sure, but they were far from immortal.

Regardless, this fight was dragging on. Neither Meta nor the Darkness could gain an edge over the other, and Kirby was barely able to keep up while hovering. He still tried to take a shot or two with his copied magic, but each time would let the Darkness gain even more of a lead if he missed.

Meta Knight snarled under his mask as he clashed with the Darkness’s sword once again. No matter what, he would not let this creature escape to wreak havoc on Popstar again, nor any other world. It died today.

Something new finally broke the stalemate as a familiar beam of violet magic speared upward, knocking the Darkness back and allowing Meta Knight to wrench its blade from its…hand? He was not quite sure what sort of appendage was holding the sword under its cloak, if there was one at all.

Meta took the moment to look downward at the approaching princess, who seemed utterly furious with the Darkness and was carrying seven droplet-shaped items in her telekinetic grip. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet droplets, to be exact. Perhaps those were what was left of the Rainbow Bridges?

She threw them at Kirby, and they seemed to gravitate towards him, orbiting around him like planets to a sun. The spun faster and faster, before finally coalescing into an iridescent sword longer than Kirby was tall, but one that he grasped all the same, discarding his magic copy ability.

The sword seemed to almost pull him upward, towards the Darkness, and in one slash, the stunned Darkness was pushed back even more and forced to reveal its true form.

It looks like Gooey, was the first thing Twilight thought.

There definitely was a resemblance between the black sphere in front of her and the blue sphere she’d left on the ground, and if what the darkness had claimed earlier was correct, that resemblance was more than superficial. Granted, Gooey was solidly an ally, and Twilight was a staunch believer that someone could do good regardless of their origins. Unless the blue blob gave them a reason to distrust him, she found no harm in letting him help them. Especially given that he fought against the being that should have been his master.

Regardless of the similarities between the darkness and Gooey, though, there were some differences. The shape was the same, along with the orange spheres behind it, but the front of the darkness was a single, large eye. It stared at the assembled group—Kirby with a rainbow sword, Meta Knight with his golden one, and Twilight with her Element—and immediately attempted to flee.

“Oh no you don’t,” Twilight growled, teleporting in front of it with her magic ready. They were high enough up now that her breath was visible in the cool, thin air, and she didn’t want to risk letting this get away.

It tried to retaliate with a black bolt of darkness (another attack rather similar to Gooey’s), but none hit, blocked by a shield Twilight summoned. Another blast of magic had it tumbling downward into a slash from Meta Knight, before Kirby stabbed it straight through, though he missed the eye.

It forced itself off of Kirby’s sword, quickly backing up as soon as it was no longer impaled, but its injury was leaking darkness and its eye was wide. It was healing, yes, but slowly. Far too slowly for it to have any hope of winning.

“So, this is what the parasite is reduced to without its host,” Twilight commented, her eyes narrow and righteous fury blazing within her. She would not soon forget what this thing did to her brother, and ordinarily she would not be so callous, even towards an enemy, but this was personal. “How pathetic.”

She lit her horn once again, sending out a wave of magic that locked the darkness in place before it could try and flee again. It strained against her, but completely failed to do anything against her magic. Meta Knight and Kirby both charged it from opposite directions, their swords at the ready to slice it apart. Twilight, meanwhile, charged up one final blast powered by the Element of Magic, ready and willing to end the threat of this darkness once and for all.

Golden sword, rainbow sword, and Magic impacted the darkness all at once. At that point, it was barely strong enough to withstand one of those things, let alone all three.

It stopped existing rather quickly.

Elsewhere in the universe, one of the most powerful beings out there felt it. Its scout was dead. It did not feel any sort of guilt, or shame, or remorse, or grief—the Whole was above such things. Emotion was below it, and its scout had violated its mission and given into its host's greed in the process. That removed any such possibility of the Whole mourning it, even if it was capable of emotion in the first place.

The only thing it felt from the death of its scout was acknowledgement that its plans were now delayed. Only slightly, though; a full-scale invasion of Stellarium was preferable to happen sooner rather than later. It would just need to work a bit harder to get past the shield the Dreamwater had placed around the system as a whole. But that would be a trivial matter for the Whole.

Soon, Stellarium—or Popstar, as the Whole learned the locals now called it from the data package its scout had sent it upon its death—would be under its control. Given the dragon’s memories, Equus would soon follow, as long as there was some way to travel there.

It hadn’t been to Stellarium in millenia; the last time it was there was before it was even the Whole. Idly, it wondered what had changed.

Author's Note

Blocky, Defender of the Halls
This Blocky is possessed by the Darkness! It's been powered up by it, and now is the ultimate protector of Dark Castle's hallways; it's part of them, after all!

Master Green, Defender of the Seas
This Master Green is possessed by the Darkness! It's been given control of every Squishy and Blipper around Dark Castle, and is working to defend its master!

King Dedede, the Possessed Sovereign
King Dedede has been taken by the Darkness! This royal penguin is now giving his all to defend his new master, the Darkness infecting his brain.

Spike, the Lost Dragon
The Darkness has now fully taken over Spike's mind, but some vestige of him seems to remain. That flame must be fed for the Darkness to be beat and the dragon saved.

Dark Swordsman
The Darkness has retreated from Spike, engaging in a swordfight! Its skills seem unmatched except by Meta Knight—maybe it's possessed another skilled fighter before.

Dark Matter
A parasite without a host, the Darkness has been backed into a corner and forced to reveal its true form. Against most, this would allow it to flee, but against these three...well, it's not like it had any hope to lose.

When I said this chapter was gonna be a doozy, I meant it.

Granted, I didn't mean for this to take seven months. I got majorly burnt out at the beginning of the semester, and by the time I had some will to write again it was all spent on either getting down ideas for Of Heroes and Magic or for my classes. But hey, I've graduated now! And with the summer, I've fallen into a proper routine, which should help avoid the burnout I'd felt.

And, well, I hope that a 14,500-word chapter is enough of an apology for having a long, unplanned hiatus.

On another note, the chapter! I had a lot of fun writing these fight scenes and making sure every character got something to do, even if it was a more minor role in the grand scheme of things. And as for Zero at the end...well, I won't go too much into that, since that's some spoilers territory, but I will say that I have plans for how Zero connects to the greater Kirby cosmology that'll come to light in due time.

As for when that time will be, I'll say that there'll be some nuggets of information in Chapter Thirty-Three: The Rainbow Returned. After all, Spike spent a rather long time possessed by Dark Matter...I wonder just how much he remembers.

Chapter XXXIII: The Rainbow Returned

The main thing Twilight felt as she, Kirby, and Meta Knight descended back to the ground was exhaustion. She wanted to be triumphant, and she honestly felt like she deserved to be after that ordeal, but she couldn’t muster up any feeling other than the want to collapse into a soft bed and sleep for a week.

Even with the Element of Magic helping her out over the day, she had been throwing around a lot of magic lately. Was this mana burn? She didn’t have the usual headache that went with it, but all in all she just felt sort of empty. She doubted that she’d even notice mana burn symptoms with how much her muscles burned, particularly around her wings, and the complete emotional exhaustion.

Then Kirby’s rainbow sword pulsed, and some of that emotional exhaustion abated. Twilight blinked. Maybe there was some leftover apathy from the darkness?

At that point she looked down and realized that her front was utterly coated in residue from when the creature of darkness had exploded. Meta Knight had been spared from it by most of it splashing off of his mask, and she wasn’t quite sure how Kirby had avoided getting hit, but Twilight had been splattered with the stuff.

Somewhat disgusted, she fired up her horn and pulled it off of her. Thankfully, it wasn’t very sticky and the darkness’s remains seemed to react negatively to her magic, destroying itself right there in the air. Fascinated by the display, she didn’t notice a few strands of fur on her chest, in the exact same place that the darkness had scratched her earlier using Spike’s body, turn a deeper purple than the rest of her coat.

She was still exhausted physically, but a proper triumphant feeling was starting to finally set in. They’d won. Spike was safe and sound, just unconscious alongside Dedede. Before she could really start to revel in the feeling, though, Kirby’s sword glowed so brightly that she had to shield her eyes.

When the glow subsided and Twilight placed her hoof back on the ground, the rainbow sword was no more. It had destructed itself, the seven Rainbow Droplets once again orbiting around Kirby for a moment before they shot off. The violet one landed near to them, embedding itself into the ground just shy of where the doors to Dark Castle once stood.

From that point, almost like a plant growing from a seed, a Rainbow Bridge emerged once again, stretching longer and longer until it reached Cloudy Park in the distance. When it finally touched down and seemed to magically lock itself into place, Twilight felt it. And she was sure the others did, too; that blanket feeling of apathy, the overall dulling of their emotions that the Element of Magic had been working overtime to fight against, was finally gone. The air even almost tasted fresher, and Twilight could instinctively tell that the Rainbow Bridges had been restored.

The rubble shifted by the destroyed entrance to Dark Castle, and every conscious member of the group was immediately on guard and turning towards the sound. Thankfully, though, their caution was unnecessary; the rubble had just been shifted by a very confused cat and fish.

Nago unceremoniously spat Kine out as soon as he reached the ground proper, though Coo reacted quickly to pick the sunfish up. Carefully, Nago looked at the exhausted but triumphant group as they lowered their guard, and he let a slight grin slip onto his face. “So, Ah take it ye won?”

Twilight felt herself grinning. “Yeah.”

No further elaboration was required.

The entire island they were on seemed to shake, which quickly snapped everyone out of it. Bandee was the first to speak up. “So, I don’t think this island is supposed to be floating.”

Everyone’s attention snapped to the newly-reformed Rainbow Bridge, and Sunset said what they were all thinking. “Well let’s get the hell off of it!”

Twilight quickly levitated Spike onto her back at the same time that Chuchu and Rick worked together to hold Dedede aloft. Everyone started running once their injured were properly secured, and they were quick to cross the bridge. Almost as soon as they had and they were safely back on the solid ground of Cloudy Park, the island that would likely be formerly known as Dark Castle lost whatever magic was holding it in the air. It crashed back down into the ocean with the mightiest splash Twilight had ever heard, though by some miracle it didn’t form a tsunami.

It was at that point that Twilight, finally, felt truly free from this nightmare. The darkness was dead, the Rainbow Bridges had been restored, Dark Castle was back in the water, and Spike was back, secure with her, and seemed coherent, just too tired to stay awake at the moment. If it weren’t for the hard ground underneath her, she would’ve just laid down and fallen asleep then and there from sheer relief.

Hay, she might’ve (she’d even sat down already), had Meta Knight not cleared his throat. “I do believe that, between King Dedede’s castle and my own complex on Orange Ocean, the castle is closer. That is still likely several hours away by foot, though. Is there someplace nearby where we could spend the night before we debrief in the morning?”

“Castle Iceberg is pretty spacious, y’know!” Chuchu piped up.

Bandee nodded. “I know that there’s a rather large conference hall there as well we could use for a meeting tomorrow.”

“Ah’ll hang around fer the night,” Nago said, “but as soon as that meetin’s over with Ah’ll be headin’ back ta Red Canyon ta check in with Shiro.”

Pitch nodded with him. “Ah’m sure my mama’s gonna be beside herself if Ah don’t get home soon!”

Meta sighed wearily. “I do still feel that having your account of events would be best.”

Pitch perked up. “Oh, Ah know! Ah’ll fly home tonight an’ ask Mama if Ah can come tomorrow morning!”

Before anyone could actually speak up about that suggestion, he’d flown off.

Eventually, Twilight stood up and yawned. “Let’s get going to Iceberg already.”

The campfire crackled merrily on nearby her tent as Adeline continued to paint. She’d already eaten her dinner, some canned fruit and vegetables she’d brought along for the trip, so now she was just working by the firelight, hoping to finish her work before the inspiration fled her and she retired for the evening. That inspiration that she’d felt seeing the purple horse creature take on Kracko hadn’t lasted long, but a few minutes ago she’d been hit with a second wind and taken to the canvas again.

And now, after a few long hours of working and with some flecks of purple paint adorning her cheeks from when she’d gotten a bit too forceful with her brush, Adeline stepped back with a grin to admire her art. The canvas was vertical, about fifty centimeters across on its bottom and a bit less than a meter tall. The purple winged unicorn was standing resolutely on her painted recreation of the ground, the visible parts of her face twisted into a determined snarl. The blue and pink creatures stood next to her, and a shiny purple orb represented the shield that Adeline had seen the horse creature use to defend the rest of their group.

They were, of course, standing against Kracko, represented by the other half of the canvas being covered by a dark gray stormcloud, painted strikes of lightning jumping across that half of the painting. A single eye looked down on the group, though unlike Kracko’s usual smugness, it was wide with shock and fear. This was, after all, a recreation of the moment Adeline had seen when the purple horse creature had taken down Kracko in a single strike, and the bright purple beam spearing up from their horn, even on the canvas, seemed to impart so much feeling.

It was, all in all, one of her best pieces, Adeline felt. Continuing to grin, she set up a tarp overtop of the canvas, allowing the paint to dry overnight but protecting it from any inclement weather that might pop up. She knew well how easily the weather there could flip on a dime—she’d come to Cloudy Park in the first place to really get a good look at Kracko for future references, after all!

Still, Adeline was rather giddy as she used a washcloth to wipe the paint off of her face, put out her fire, and entered her tent to settle in for the night. Getting that art out and onto the canvas had felt great, and even though she had gotten a good look at Kracko while he battled the purple horse creature, she was thinking of sticking around Cloudy Park for a few more days anyway. He might return, after all, and she had enough canned food to last for a week. Plus, the isolation was helpful for working on her technique to animate her art. She still had to work out some issues she was having with the magic that her father had taught her, and her paint golems were never quite as versatile or powerful as the real things they represented.

She frowned a bit at the thought of her late father, but that tragedy was in the past. He had told her to stay strong before sending her off to Popstar for her own safety, so that was what she’d do. She’d shake off these sad thoughts and focus on the future.

Quickly falling asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, Adeline’s dreams that night were full of purple lasers and paint. The Fountain, though, prevented staves and skulls from invading her sleeping mind.

The waters of Secret Sea were rough under Popstar’s three moons, but Captain Vul wasn’t going to let that deter him from his mission. He’d already lost enough time wallowing in whatever it was that came over him and his crew, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to lose any more. Especially since the wind and waves seemed to have snapped them out of whatever funk they were in, and the situation had gotten far worse than the fair weather they'd had in the morning.

“I am not losing another damn boat this soon,” Vul growled, mostly to himself, as he stumbled a bit at the ship’s rocking. “Mace Knight!” he barked. “Head belowdecks and check in with Axe to see if the scan’s got any results! If this storm doesn’t let up I’ll have to turn this boat around and head back to port!”

Mace Knight, currently the only other occupant of the bridge, saluted. “Aye aye, Cap’n!”

Vul grumbled a bit at being called that, but Mace was gone before he could actually vocalize anything. His communicator beeping and a staticy voice cutting through distracted him, though.

“Vul!” Sailor Dee’s voice rang out, though the storm was messing with the connection enough that Vul could barely recognize it. “Vul, come in!”

Vul yanked the device off of his belt and spoke. “Is something going on at the complex?”

Sailor was quiet for a moment, probably thinking on how to answer. “Not really. I don’t know much, but Meta Knight flew off with Miss Shimmer in a hurry after we got news from Castle Dedede that Spike the Dragon had been possessed.”

Vul sucked in a breath. “Was that where the whole…emotional funk was coming from? Did you all feel that, too?”

“I think so, but I will have to check with Sir when he gets back,” Sailor said. “For now, it’s good to know that you’re safe.”

Vul stumbled again as the ship rocked and something fell over on the bridge. “Sure, ‘safe.’ Let’s go with that.”

“I heard a crash,” Sailor noted. “Are you certain that you’re fine to be at sea right now?”

“I’m turning this ship around soon, anyway,” Vul said. “Mace and Axe are just checking right now to see if-”

“Captain!” Axe Knight’s cry cut him off, the man rushing onto the bridge with Mace right behind. “We’ve found it!”

He shoved a folder into Vul’s wings, nearly forcing the captain to drop his communicator. Quickly, he peeked at the contents, and his eyes widened. “We’ll be back in an hour, Sailor.”

He clipped the communicator back onto his belt and looked again at the folder. It was a series of printed off sonar scans of the seafloor, a set of coordinates written across the top of one particular print. That scan had an unusual bump in the topography of the ocean floor, and its shape told Vul that his crew had, in fact, found what they were looking for.

They’d found the wreckage of the Halberd.

Now they just needed to get to work shoring it up.

Rainbow Dash yawned loudly, which seemed to trigger a series of other yawns all around Discord’s living room. “Alright, I’m beat,” she said, taking to the air and beginning to hover towards the filing cabinet.

She was the first to recover from the stupor that witnessing that final battle had everypony in. It was…intense, Fluttershy felt was the best way to put it. She was happy that Spike was freed from that parasite (and, as terrifying a thought as it was, studying such a creature in a safer environment would likely be fascinating), of course. Immensely so, though she didn’t have quite as intense of a reaction as Shining Armor, who actually broke into relieved tears.

Everypony, thankfully, was tactful enough to not mention it. Though Fluttershy did have to poke Discord a bit to make sure he kept his mouth shut.

Most of the others were fairly quiet as they dispersed, with it being so late and them having to get home. Applejack, Fluttershy knew, was probably feeling guilty over leaving the day’s chores to Big Mac and Applebloom. Rarity had complained during their last spa day that her sales numbers were down a bit this quarter from what she’d predicted, so Fluttershy figured that she wasn’t particularly happy about having to close the boutique for a day either.

Both of them were quiet while leaving, just offering soft goodbyes, and Pinkie followed after them after giving Fluttershy a quick hug. And at that, it was just Fluttershy, Discord, and the two royals in the room.

“Do you think,” Cadance said after a moment, “that you might be able to contact us if something like this happens again, Discord?”

Discord stroked his beard, hemming and hawing. “I dunno…” he drawled. “That seems like a lot of work…”

Fluttershy gave him a look and let out a disappointed sigh. “Discord…”

He rolled his eyes. “Alright, fine.” He snapped his paw, and suddenly the four of them were back in Fluttershy’s cottage. Over her door was a light bulb, though oddly it was a heptagon. Discord snapped his tail, and it started glowing, though not the soft yellow of other incandescent bulbs that Fluttershy had seen and was subconsciously expecting; it instead seemed to cycle through a rainbow. Though, looking closer, Fluttershy noted that it was a minus rainbow; it started on cyan and cycled through magenta and yellow.

Discord grinned his snaggletoothed grin. “There! Now when something interesting happens on Popstar I can let Fluttershy know!”

Fluttershy raised an eyebrow at him. “And you want me to let the others know?”

Discord shrugged dismissively. “Well I can’t go around and ask everypony if they want to watch Twiggles prance around on Popstar! So I’ll…” he seemed to consider his words for a moment, “defer to you on who is best to tell!”

Fluttershy sighed and looked at Cadance and Shining. “That’s the best we’re going to get,” she said, ignoring Discord’s indignant “Hey!” in the background.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Shining Armor added, speaking more to Fluttershy than Discord. “Meta Knight definitely knows something about what was going on there, and I want to hear what, exactly, it was.”

Fluttershy nodded with a smile, though Discord crossed his arms with a huff. “Well, I can tell when I’m not wanted. I’ll see you then, McShieldface.”

He raised his talon to snap, though just before he did, Fluttershy began to speak.

“Oh, Discord, before you go, I wanted to ask about somepony you mentioned named Har-”

The snap completed, and Discord vanished in a flash of light before Fluttershy could finish the question.

“Oh,” she stated the obvious, “he’s already gone.”

Shining seemed a bit concerned at puzzling over the nickname. “‘McShieldface?’” he asked. “Really? I feel like he could’ve done better than that.”

Cadance giggled. “It’d be like if he called me ‘McHeartface.’”

“Well, he’s called Twilight ‘McBookface’ before, among other things,” Fluttershy commented. “Maybe it’s something that he saves for your family?”

They all shared a chuckle over the thought of Discord doing something predictable, which in itself wasn’t all that far-fetched, in Fluttershy’s opinion. She’d spent enough time with the draconequus at this point that she could tell that even he, in all his chaotic glory, had habits.

“Anyway, Fluttershy, thank you so much for having us today,” Cadance said. “I’d thank Discord as well, but he’s…not here, obviously.”

Fluttershy smiled. “It was a pleasure. I’ll see you tomorrow, I take it?”

Shining nodded. “Hopefully not as early.”

“Well, after what they all went through, I hope they’ll sleep in!”

They did not, in fact, sleep in.

This was mostly because Spike woke up at four in the morning and immediately panicked about the (from his perspective) sudden change in location. Twilight didn’t blame him, of course—she doubted that many would be calm in his situation—but it led to everyone spending the night in Castle Iceberg being up relatively early.

The castle’s kitchens hadn’t magically restocked themselves from when they’d stopped there for lunch, so their breakfast that morning was far from hearty. It existed, though, and importantly the workers that Dedede had sent Iceberg’s way had stocked it with coffee grounds and left a coffee machine there as well. Sunset praised it like a deity when she found it at four thirty, and according to Meta Knight’s eyewitness account when he later recounted the event to Twilight, she downed three cups of the stuff before she let anyone else close to the machine.

She had still been working to calm Spike down at the time. And herself, if she was being honest; both of them took a bit to internalize that they were safe and that Twilight had her brother back. The darkness was no longer an immediate threat.

All in all, though, it took them a while to properly get themselves set up and for Pitch to arrive with his mother in tow. Their debriefing started at ten, and before they began, Twilight took a moment to look around the room. Castle Iceberg, thankfully, had a massive conference room with an equally massive table that could accommodate them all, though barely. It helped that Coo, Pitch, and Pitch’s mother weren’t sitting, and that Twilight had fashioned a clear container of ice to fill with water for Kine’s comfort. Meta Knight sat at the head of the table, as one of the de facto leaders of this alliance that they’d started. Sunset sat to his left, followed by Twilight and then Spike. Kirby was next to him, though he was distracted making faces at Gooey across the table.

Next to him was Bandee, sitting at his king’s right hand. Dedede had claimed the other head of the table, as the major political player in the group native to Popstar itself. Finally, the other half of the table held the aforementioned Gooey, along with Rick to his left, Nago to his, and finally Chuchu sat directly across from Sunset.

The silence at the table was palpable, as everyone had much on their minds but were unsure of how to put it into words. Eventually, though, Meta Knight broke it.

“I know you all likely have questions,” he said, “but I believe that it would first be pertinent to get the full story out there. Princess, you were there when Spike was possessed, correct?”

Twilight looked up and nodded, launching into the tale. The others chipped in when relevant (mainly Dedede boasting about the fights that he participated in) or for a few parts that were a struggle to get through emotionally. All the while, Meta nodded and hummed in thought; clearly he was piecing together some sort of picture, though of what Twilight had no clue.

Once she was done, he asked those who had been possessed about their experiences, and it mirrored what they had told Twilight upon being freed. With the exception of Rick, all of the animals that they’d fought and recruited had been directly possessed by the darkness, and they all had the same sort of experience. Their memories were fuzzy, and they didn’t really get any information from their time under the darkness.

All that took the better part of an hour, and when Pitch finally finished giving his account, Meta Knight turned towards Spike. “And what about your experiences, Spike the Dragon?”

Spike audibly gulped, and Twilight wrapped a wing around him to provide some comfort. She’d found that the reminders that she was there, that he was safe, helped keep him calm. He was shaking a bit, but he eventually spoke up.

“I…I remember a bit more than the others,” he admitted. “It’s not a lot, but the Darkness thought kinda loud whenever I was…awake? Is that the right word?”

Meta blinked, surprised enough that Twilight could tell even with the mask. “I was aware that you were fighting back against the Darkness, but for you to have resisted it even from the beginning…” he fell silent for a moment, before nodding, seemingly satisfied. “You did well, young dragon.”

Spike preened a bit at the praise, but quickly fell back into a more somber mood. “It…kept commenting that I had Heart, and whenever I woke up it tried harder to push me back down.” He paused for a moment, considering what to say. “I think it was right after it fought Twilight and whenever it stored a Rainbow Droplet away that I woke up, but I still remember some of what it thought about and what it did to me…” He shuddered a bit, but suddenly blinked in surprise. “Wait, can I still…”

He fell quiet for a bit, intensely focused on something, when suddenly some sparks of electricity jumped between his claws and he whooped in triumph. Twilight did quickly retract her wing when he inadvertently shocked her, though, and he looked sheepish.

“We’ll, ah, work on that,” Twilight said, not quite sure how to take the fact that her brother now had permanent lightning powers on top of his fire-breathing and natural magic resistance.

“Regardless,” Meta Knight said, “do you remember anything else from your time under the Darkness?”

Spike looked down again, thinking hard. “I…I think it was trying to prepare something by breaking the Rainbow Bridges? It wasn’t super clear in its thoughts, just loud.” He perked up. “Oh, it kept mentioning something called ‘the Whole,’ though!”

Meta sucked in a breath, his eyes wide behind his mask. Twilight could feel her ears instinctively tuck back, and everyone else at the table felt the concern as well.

“That’s…bad, I take it?” Sunset said.

Meta sighed, and seemed to prepare himself for a long talk. “Very. Most of what I know of the Darkness comes from the very few survivors of it that my colony has encountered. Usually, those survivors are just people that happened to be off-world when their planet was taken, but a precious few manage to sometimes escape their world’s death.”

Twilight’s eyes went wide. “This thing takes out entire planets on the regular?”

“Entire worlds shrouded in darkness, corrupting all that it comes across…” Sunset whispered, looking directly at Meta. “That’s what you said back when we took down the Halberd. The Darkness is one of the threats you mentioned.”

Meta Knight nodded. “I had hoped we had more time before we had to deal with Zero, though.”

Nago looked puzzled, along with most of the rest of the table. “Zero?” he asked.

Meta sighed again, looking distant. “The last time my colony encountered a survivor of the Darkness, I was nine years old, by our calendar. My parents attempted to stop me from trying to see him, but I was a curious child, and my great-great-great grandmother was happy to enable me,” he said, some fondness dripping into his voice. “My grandmother, thankfully, had traded with his species before, and spoke some of his language, so we were able to translate his babblings after we rescued him from what would’ve been a slow death among the stars.”

“Babblings?” Dedede asked. “So I take it he wasn’t all there, then.”

Meta Knight shook his head. “He was not. From what my grandmother gathered, he was one of the few members of his species still alive, and the only member of his ship’s crew that had survived to when we picked him up.”

Twilight winced. “That’s…that’s horrid. The Darkness just wiped out an entire planet, just like that?”

“It’s…a bit more complex than that,” Meta continued. “His planet had had an encounter with the Darkness before, but successfully drove it off, similarly to what we have just done.” His gaze darkened. “Except a few months later, it came back with reinforcements. An entire army of Darkness descended upon his world, accompanied by what we think was the leader of all Darkness in the universe. He didn’t give it a proper name; he just called it what it felt like to simply gaze upon it. He felt empty, hollow, nothing, Zero.”

“Sacre bleu,” Chuchu whispered. “And…you think that this Zero is coming here? To Popstar?”

“I think,” Meta Knight responded, “that this ‘Whole’ that Spike heard about is Zero. It is part of why I was so insistent on chasing down the Darkness and killing it before it escaped, but if they can communicate telepathically like we suspect then we may already be on a strict timetable.”

“Shit,” Sunset swore. “They’re a hivemind?”

Meta shook his head. “It would be easier if it was—Spike would know everything about its plans, then. By my colony’s best reckoning, it is more similar to an ant colony, albeit one that can communicate telepathically rather than chemically.”

Bandee gave a weary sigh. “How long do we have?”

“Months, at best,” Meta said.

“It won’t be months,” Spike spoke up, shaking a bit. Twilight once again wrapped a wing around him for some semblance of comfort. She needed it too; the thought that they weren't done with this already was disheartening, to say the least. “Popstar seemed important to it. It kept going on and on about Heart and Dream and for some reason it seemed afraid of Kirby and kept calling him a Voidspawn.”

Kirby looked up at the mention of his name, but contributed nothing other than a reassuring smile.

Meta actually seemed taken aback by that. “I…do not know what that is. I had assumed that Kirby was an Astral, like me, but the Darkness called me an Astral, so Voidspawn cannot simply be what it calls us.” He tapped the bottom of his mask in thought. “How curious.”

“Back on track, we have what, weeks at best?” Sunset asked. “How the hell are we supposed to beat back this thing?”

“The Darkness reacts negatively to strong emotion,” Meta Knight said. “Along with Galaxia, your magic, and-”

“Friendship!” Kirby cut in.

Meta nodded. “Yes, friendship is, at least minorly, a deterrent to the Darkness.”

Twilight couldn’t help but giggle at that. Yes, the Power of Friendship was quite useful. Her Element pulsed a bit as she thought of how she knew that first-hoof.

“So what can we do, then?” Pitch asked.

His mother huffed. “Well, you won’t be doing anything. You’re grounded from going on any adventures, young man.”

“Aww, really Ma?” Pitch whined. “Ah can help!”

“The Darkness won’t care about anyone’s age,” Meta Knight cut in, speaking to Pitch’s mother. “If we run into him again, we’ll try to keep him out of any active fighting, but I cannot promise that either yourself or your son won’t fall victim to the Darkness. It would behoove you to at least be aware of our plans.”

The pink bird huffed again, but didn’t raise any further complaints.

“The Rainbow Bridges would help fight off the Darkness, right?” Dedede asked as they returned to properly planning. “That’s why it wanted to destroy them. I can take a fighting force and station them out here in Castle Iceberg.” He looked around. “It’d do well to establish a proper claim here, too.”

“I’m alright with staying at Castle Dedede to defend that,” Twilight added, gesturing to her tiara. “I don’t think Castle Iceberg can take its full population, so someone needs to defend Castle Dedede. The Element of Magic will help with that.”

Bandee nodded in agreement. “What about the Meta-Knights?”

“I will make sure to secure our base on Orange Ocean,” the man himself said, holding up his sword. “Galaxia was originally designed to fight off the Darkness, or so our legends say. Unfortunately, the original records of its construction have been lost.”

“Well, it definitely helped against the Darkness we fought,” Twilight chipped in.

Meta Knight nodded, but he still seemed contemplative. “I fear that Galaxia alone might not be enough. Princess Twilight, if you feel that your Element is enough defense on its own, may I ask for Miss Shimmer to stay with the Meta-Knights for the time being?”

Twilight nodded in Sunset’s direction. “I think that’s her decision, first and foremost.”

The mare in question just shrugged. “We still need to go over that book I found, anyway. Might as well stay there for a bit longer.”

“Bandana,” Dedede said, “could you return to Castle Dedede with the Princess and send Captain Montoya’s force over here?”

Bandee gave his king a salute. “Of course, Your Majesty!”

“Well, dat’s all well an’ good,” Kine spoke up, his voice a bit distorted by the water he was in, “but what ‘bout da rest o’ us?”

“You all should probably return home,” Meta Knight said. “Return to your friends and family, and make sure that you keep your bonds with them strong. The Darkness will try to break them, but the stronger your relationships—be they platonic, romantic, familial, or otherwise—the easier it is to fight back.”

Kirby cheered at that, reaching across the table to high-hoof (high-nub? Twilight still wasn’t entirely sure what his appendages were called) Gooey. The blob, of course, responded by sticking out his tongue to meet Kirby’s arm.

That, though, gave her a bit of pause. And she hated to think negatively about someone who was definitely solidly on their side, but he was still formerly part of the Darkness. “What about Gooey?” Twilight finally asked.

Meta Knight definitely frowned behind his mask. “He may be in even more danger than the rest of us,” he said. “He was once part of the Darkness as well, was he not? The chances may be high that Zero will try to reabsorb him.”

Kirby huffed and shook his head at the thought of Zero going after Gooey, and Gooey himself narrowed his eyes resolutely. “No!” he declared, and Twilight had to think for a moment to remember if that was the first word he’d actually spoken.

“It may still be something to strongly consider-” Meta Knight began before Gooey cut him off again.

He shook himself. “Nuh uh!” he said. “No Whole!”

Meta seemed deep in thought. “I suppose that it is possible that whatever happened to free Gooey from the Darkness and allow him to develop his own personality fundamentally changed him, and Zero would now be unable to absorb him…”

“Well, Kirby found him first, you all said, right?” Spike spoke up. “Maybe it has to do with why the Darkness was calling him a Voidspawn?”

Meta Knight considered that for a while, before seeming to realize that they’d gotten off-track. “Regardless, we have our plan.” He took a deep breath. “It’s hodge-podge, and I’m unaware of any planet that has successfully driven off Zero, but if Popstar is so important to it, we cannot afford to lose. The entire universe might be at stake. When the Darkness comes for us, remember that, and fight with all you have.”

Everyone was silent for a few moments after that declaration. “Well, that was dramatic,” Dedede said, getting up. “I’m off to check out the rest of Castle Iceberg.”

At that, everyone else began to disperse, with Coo grabbing onto Kine and agreeing to drop him off in Ripple Field on his way back to Big Forest. Pitch and his mother were the next ones out the door, quickly followed by both Nago and Rick, who both had their own loved ones to get back to. Chuchu stuck around for a bit, meandering out the door with the others, who all left at around the same time.

“Ooh, I’ll have to find mon amie Adeline and warn her about all of this!” she commented after they were in the halls for a bit.

Sunset blinked. “Adeline?” she asked.

Chuchu nodded exuberantly. “She’s a friend I made when she visited Iceberg a few months ago! Apparently she’s not from Popstar, and she’s the one that’s been teaching me some words in…I think she said it’s called Français. It’s her native language!”

Sunset seemed both alarmed and thoughtful at that, a fact that neither Twilight nor Meta Knight failed to notice.

“Cady,” Shining said, turning to his wife with determination in his eyes. “We’re staying in Ponyville until all that goes down.”

Cadance sighed. She figured that her husband, as protective as he was, would want to watch over Twilight, even as she was trapped in another world. Unfortunately… “We still have duties in the Crystal Empire, Shining,” she reminded. “We can’t stay here indefinitely.”

Shining grumbled. “Fine then, Discord,” he said, startling the chaos spirit a bit. Clearly he hadn’t expected to be addressed directly. “I’m giving you permission to kidnap me and have me as a guest to watch the goings-on on Popstar iff Twily is in danger from this Zero.” After a moment, he added, “And that’s an if and only if, by the way.”

Discord waved him off. “I caught the double f in the first place, don’t worry.”

Cadance wondered if that was some joke that she wasn’t privy to, given that Ponish didn’t have a letter called ‘f’, but she attributed it to Discord being Discord. “Honey,” she gently said, “I don’t think giving a chaos god permission to kidnap you is particularly wise.”

“Well I think it’s reasonable,” Discord chipped in.

Fluttershy, who had accompanied them into Discord’s home (Cadance figured it was mostly to prevent the draconequus from trying anything), raised an eyebrow at him. “Yes, Discord, but your opinion is…” she paused for a moment, probably searching for the right word. “Biased.”

“I said what I said, and I stand by it,” Shining spoke up. “Just make sure you put me back when everything is over.”

The journey back to Orange Ocean took the rest of the day, and Solaria had already set by the time Sunset and Meta Knight arrived. The rest of the evening was taken up by them debriefing the rest of the Meta-Knights and them, in turn, sharing that they’d found the wreckage of the Halberd and were planning on restoring it. Sunset wasn’t quite sure what to think about that, given how much work she’d put into sinking it in the first place, but she did admit that having such a warship on their side would be useful.

The next morning, with her mana burn finally having fully healed (having alicorn-level casting ability sounded great on the surface, but it really just meant that she had to rest for even longer than before to recover. It was a pain, really), Sunset retrieved the book she’d taken from Aquarius out of her magical storage. She’d done this a few times since she’d gotten it, just staring at the foreign letters. Even years later, learning written English was still fresh on her mind, and she just couldn’t shake how similar this script seemed to the Latin alphabet.

“Language on the mind?” Meta Knight’s voice asked from above her.

Sunset glanced upward, at this point unfazed by the knight’s propensity for silently flying above people before speaking. “I just…” she sighed, trailing off. Meta was definitely more trustworthy than Marx was, but she wasn’t about to spill her entire backstory again. “I spent some time in another world before this one, and I had to learn the native language to fit in,” she eventually elaborated. “And this looks so much like Latin, but it’s all distorted and warped. And now Chuchu apparently knows someone whose native language is French of all things, and I can’t help but feel that there’s some connection.”

Meta glided down to get a better look at the book, and Sunset could almost feel his contemplative frown. “Perhaps we could compare it to some modern Astral text? It might help you determine if that connection is legitimate.”

Sunset shrugged. “Might as well. Lead the way.”

The two began trekking towards the Meta-Knights’ extensive records library, most of which was in Somnic (which Sunset had recently been putting in an effort to properly learn; if she was going to be stuck on Popstar she might as well learn how to read there), but some of the texts Meta had brought with him when he came to Popstar were in Astral. During the walk, though, Sunset couldn’t help but notice that Meta Knight constantly had his right hand on the hilt of Galaxia—he really was prepared to begin fighting at a moment’s notice.

It was fair, of course. None of them knew when, exactly, Zero would strike, but Sunset was hoping that they’d have a week, at least.

Those thoughts were pushed aside when they reached the library, though, and Meta Knight flew up to grab a book off of the shelf as Sunset made her way over to one of the tables in the room. Flying back down, Meta cracked the book open as Sunset opened up what she was almost certain was a journal of some sort. Getting a proper look at the headers for each section of the book cemented that thought even more.

Meta seemed to agree, peering at each of them. “These are definitely dates,” he said. He glanced between Sunset’s journal and his own reference text, considering something as she peered at his book. The letters looked different enough that Astral almost seemed to have swapped to a different writing system altogether, but a few symbols were similar enough to show that the two systems were definitely related, at the very least.

“Can you tell what those dates are?” Sunset asked.

“Just the years, probably,” Meta Knight said. “Or what I think are years. These are certainly numbers, at least.” He carefully took the journal in his hands, flipping to the first entry. “It looks like that, in whatever calendar system they were using, this first entry was written in the year two thousand, two hundred twenty-one, and the final one…” he flipped the pages to reach that final, dreaded page marking the writer’s death, “was in two thousand, two hundred twenty-eight.”

So that ruled out the likelihood of this being some childhood diary that they’d kept into adulthood, given that they’d apparently only been writing in it for seven years. At least, she hoped that it wasn’t a childhood diary. No child deserved a fate as grizzly as what she’d found under the waters of Aquarius. That led to another thought, though. “Hey, out of curiosity, what calendar system do you use?”

Meta Knight blinked. “Well, Popstar’s is currently in the year one thousand, five hundred twenty-four, and uses a system of three hundred seventy days in a year, where one day is a period of twenty-four hours. The Astral calendar is similar, though its years are slightly shorter at three hundred sixty-five days, with the technical definition of a day being eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds. It’s currently in the year two thousand, one hundred thirty-seven. Why do you ask?”

Sunset shook her head. That was another set of strange coincidences. Why in the world would a species that traveled the stars use twenty-four-hour days, let alone three hundred sixty-five-day years? With Astral script seemingly related to Latin, French apparently existing in this universe, that entire experience on Halfmoon, and now Astrals apparently using the Gregorian calendar, she had to think that humans existed in this universe. Or at the very least, some version of Earth did.

Shaking that thought away for the time being, though, she continued with some questioning about the journal. “What about the other words you said you recognized?” she asked. “‘Star’ and ‘dream,’ right?”

“Those two appear rather often, yes, but I’m not well-versed enough in Ancient Astral to tell much more than that.” He seemed to consider something for a moment, scanning the pages. “Though, the word ‘heart’ has stayed rather consistent as well, but it doesn’t show up nearly as often.” Flipping back to the first entry, Meta Knight pointed out a particular pair of words. “Here, for example, ‘star’ and ‘dream’ show up right next to each other. I’m unsure of its significance, though; the author may just have been poetic.” His eyes narrowed as he caught sight of something else, though. “But this is concerning, especially since it’s the only number in the text itself.”

He pointed to a particular character that showed up a few times throughout the journal, a sort of vertically elongated spiral. Its bottom right and top corners came to right angles, though, making it look like it should have fully enclosed itself. And since Meta Knight called it a number, her mind jumped to a numeral that she was aware of. A particular Arabic numeral, to be exact, one that this character greatly resembled.

And the more she stared at it, the more Sunset realized that she was looking at a stylized 0.

“SIR META KNIGHT!” Sailor’s voice rang out from behind them as she sprinted into the library, and Sunset forced the journal back into magical storage on reflex. “We need you outside. Now.”

Doors were flung open with wild abandon and left that way as they charged through the complex to the nearest exit. Upon reaching the outside, Sunset glanced around at nearly every member of the Meta-Knights staring up at the sky. Warily, she looked up as well, and immediately felt her ears fall back at what she saw.

“By the stars,” Meta Knight said, his voice wavering with fear that Sunset had never seen him display before. “It’s here.”

In the heavens was a giant blob of Darkness, almost as large as the Galactic Nova had been, staring down with a single, blood red eye.

“Oh. Oh dear,” Discord noted, staring at the screen and jamming his talon on the button to light up the warning over Fluttershy’s door. Feeling this much concern that he was almost afraid for another being…it was an almost foreign feeling to him, but the Darkness was bad news all around and Fluttershy would be sad if Twilight died. Yes, that had to be the only reason he was this concerned. He couldn’t be getting invested in the life of somepony other than Fluttershy—that would be preposterous!

He had to hope that they’d pull through, though.

And almost absentmindedly, he snapped his tail to pull Shining Armor directly from the train he was on, which was heading back to the Crystal Empire. He’d asked for it, after all.

Bandee shuddered as he readied his spear, staring up at the sky. Spike was shaking as well, but he had resolutely stood his ground and demanded to help when the time came—it was all hands on deck against the Darkness, after all. Twilight had, eventually, relented, on the grounds that she would be with him at all times and would be using the Element of Magic to protect him.

Staring up at the eye in the sky, though, even with Twilight next to them and with her Element pulsing, Bandee could still feel terror and despair clawing at his heart. He’d thought they’d have more time!

“I thought we had a week!” King Dedede shouted incredulously, staring up at the Darkness as he and the rest of Castle Iceberg readied themselves to do their damndest to fight it off.

“The damn thing’s already here,” Rick noted, staring up at the sky.

Pick shivered in their shared burrow. She’d heard her boyfriend describe the Darkness when he came back after helping fend it off, and the idea of it already being back for round two was horrifying.

Unfortunately, that horrifying thought was also reality.

Perched on a branch in Big Forest, Coo narrowed his eyes at the sky. “Whispy,” he said, waking the tree he was sitting on. “Get ready for the fight of our bloody lives.”

“Mine, get da family ready; it’s here,” Kine said after diving back down from his watch on the surface.

Mine swam up a bit to give her husband a peck on the cheek. “Dat Darkness best be prepared if it wants ta get through us!” she claimed, before swimming off to warn the rest of Ripple Field.

It was finally time to mobilize.

Chuchu gulped looking up, swimming between the waters of Iceberg and Red Canyon. She still wasn’t quite sure where Adeline was, and now she was alone in the water.

Glancing around, she made a decision to swim for Ripple Field as quickly as she could. There were safety in numbers, after all, and Kine was there!

“Oh ye’ve got ta be kiddin’ me!” Nago roared up at the sky, Shiro looking at the giant eye there and paling as well. “It cannae have waited more than two days?”

Pitch stared up at the sky from behind his mother’s wing. He was scared, sure. Terrified, even. But he knew what it was like to be under the Darkness’s control. And he would do everything he could to help fight back and prevent anyone else from falling prey to it.

Adeline dropped her paintbrush mid-stroke when she happened to look upward. Her crude, practice painting of Kracko was left half-finished in the process, as her mind tried and failed to comprehend what she was seeing. She knew that this universe was full of eldritch beings that her mortal self was ill-suited to fight against (the Skull Gang’s raid of her home and her father’s subsequent death still weighed heavily on her mind, as much as she tried to ignore it), but she had thought that Popstar would protect her. That’s what her father had told her when he sent her away.

So why did it feel like one of those eldritch abominations was here?

“Uh, Boss?”

“What is it, Storo?” Daroach snapped, looking up from his work. “I’ve almost figured out our next heist!”

The big blue mouse pointed upward, where Spinni and Doc were already staring, mouths agape. Daroach turned around to look, and almost dropped the Triple Star Cane (an artifact he had stolen from a temple in Jam Jungle ages ago while Doc fended off some Noddy in a jester hat who had the same theft idea) when he did.

“What in the world is that?”

“Taranza, take Princess Joronia to one of the saferooms and hide!”

Taranza jolted away from staring at the giant eye in the sky and looked to his sovereign. “But, Your Majesty-”

King Araneus IV of Floralia cut him off by drawing one of his sabers. “I don’t know what that thing is,” he said, “but if I die today, Floralia will still need its leadership.” He looked down at Taranza, offering a small smile. “I know my daughter wishes to choose Sectonia as her regnal name, and it would truly be a shame if my grandmother’s name doesn’t live on. Please, protect her.”

Taranza only hesitated a moment before saluting with two of his hands. “With my life, Sir.”

King Araneus gave him a pointed, knowing look. “I don’t need you to die for her, Taranza. I need you to live for her.”

Despite the direness of the situation, Taranza felt himself blushing when he got the king’s implication that he approved of his and Joronia’s (currently secret) courtship.

“Now go!” King Areneus barked, and Taranza quickly floated towards Joronia’s quarters.

As nearly every being on the side of Stellarium facing away from the Heavenly Light gazed upward, the Fountain of Dreams almost audibly whirred with how much magic it was putting into fending off the Darkness. But the Dreamwater could only do so much, and Zero had been strategic about shutting down the system’s defenses. The Fountain’s seven brethren had all gone dark before it could organize a pulse to push away the Darkness.

Had it just been an advancing force on its own, it could still force the Darkness out of the system (and probably destroy quite a bit of it in the process) as just a single Fountain, but Zero being here in the flesh (for a given definition of “flesh”) was complicating things. Oh, it was trying to force the Darkness away, but all of its attempts were directly countered by Zero working against it.

That, at least, would keep Zero itself occupied for the time being. The Fountain of Dreams now just had to fall back to Stellarium’s last line of defense: the Voidspawn inhabiting the planet.

With the Dreamwater sufficiently neutralized, there was only one last barrier that the Whole had to break before the Darkness could properly invade Stellarium: its rings.

The rings of Stellarium were rather different than those of other planets. Firstly, they were young, a mere two thousand, one hundred thirty-seven years old by the Whole's count. Secondly, they defied the laws of physics as much as the rest of Stellarium did. Thirdly, they were solid. Fourthly, they were intensely magical. And fifthly, they were intensely magical because they were a corpse.

Lunaris’s mother was long dead, of course; Selene had been slain millenia prior by an enraged, fallen hero (if the Whole could feel proud about that parting shot it’d gotten at that particularly vexing Voidspawn, it would). But some vestige of the magic she’d used in her final moments remained, acting as a final shield against the Darkness trying to invade the system.

CRACK

If it weren’t for the Dreamwater’s interference, the Whole would have just forced its way through already with brute force. But it was occupied with Dream (one of the real antitheses to Darkness, along with Heart and Soul) at the moment, so its minions would have to do the work.

CRACK

It truly was unfortunate that Nebula had failed in its mission, or else the Darkness would have claimed Popstar centuries ago. The amount of effort the Whole had had to put into designing a piece of itself that could effectively use and circumvent Dream had set its plans for universal domination back a few centuries, since it had failed to take Stellarium.

CRACK

But it was no matter. Stellarium's rings had finally shattered, and though the Whole itself remained in space, held back by the Dreamwater’s shield, the rest of the Darkness eagerly descended upon the planet.

Author's Note

The Dream Land 2 arc has ended.

But since when am I one to give our heroes a break? Dream Land 3 has already begun. They best hope that two days was enough time to prepare.

And, well, this is a planet-wide event, too. The heroes are far from the only ones affected by Zero's assault.

Good luck, Planet Popstar.

Chapter XXXIV: Five

[Quick trigger warning before the chapter starts, becuase this one gets intense enough to warrant it. This chapter contains graphic depictions of violence, severe injury, and minor character death.]

Steel clashed against steel as Araneus’s blade blocked a blow from one of his own guardsmen. The darkness had rained down from the sky like a swarm of locusts, and before Araneus had known it, three of his personal guards had been attacked. Their eyes had become as black as coal, and the three infected guards had turned their swords on him in an instant.

He let his left saber drop from his top left hand to the bottom left to better deflect a swing from the second guardsman. Whatever this was, it retained the skill of his guards while possessing them. Araneus himself was skilled with a blade, sure, but he was not arrogant enough to think that he could take on three of his own men at the same time—had they been at full strength, at least. The things possessing them seemed unwilling to use their magic (he hoped it was unwillingness and not unknowingness, though, because the latter implied that they could learn), so he didn’t have to worry about his Red Antler guards flinging fire at him.

They constantly had him on the back foot (in a metaphorical sense, of course; Araneus, like all of his species, primarily moved by floating) though, because despite his six hands, he only had two swords. That was, perhaps, a bit of an oversight on his part (dual-wielding was a far simpler matter when one had six floating hands capable of independent motion, so adding more swords to the mix should be feasible), but he was making use of his four other hands, regardless. Two of his right hands (the top and bottom ones—the middle hand was currently gripping a saber) had ripped a shield from one of the statues adorning the castle halls. It was ornamental, so it likely wouldn’t last forever, a fact emphasized by the clang of a metal-on-metal strike ringing out as he used it to block a strike from the final possessed guard. Thankfully, he didn’t need it to last long.

His final two hands on his left were organizing a spell while he fought with the other four. He was never the best with magic, so unlike his daughter and her lover (and he was equal parts miffed and amused that they were keeping their courtship a “secret;” they’d been friends for over a decade and had been obviously pining for years, everyone already knew), Araneus never really fell back on magical solutions to his problems. That was biting him in the abdomen, now, given how out of practice he was.

Still, he wasn’t completely helpless. After deflecting another swing and successfully disarming one of the guards, he released the spell. The sticky webbing shot out from the space between his hands, entrapping the guard and binding him to the wall. Araneus wasn’t quite sure how this possession worked—he hoped to the stars and back that it was reversible—and he wasn’t willing to resort to lethal options against his own men, so magic webs it was. At least it’d hold him for a while; without his sword to help him cut the webs, the spell would hold for at least an hour.

One down, two to go.

He whirled around, anticipating a strike from behind after binding the first guard. He bashed his now-battered shield forward, hitting the Antler on the head and disorienting him. Tossing the shield aside while simultaneously fending off a strike from the other Antler on his left, he wormed his right blade past the disoriented one’s guard and successfully disarmed him.

Another web, and another Antler stuck to the wall.

With both of the other guards down, the third was far easier to deal with. He had Araneus’s full attention, and even without a proper shield, his skill with two swords was enough. The clash of steel on steel rang a few times more before he managed to entrap the Antler’s sword between both of his own. He twisted, wincing a bit at the snapping sound of some of the guard’s exoskeleton breaking, but it accomplished his goal of getting him to drop the sword. Having shaken off the rust a bit, Araneus’s spell came easily this time, and all three of the Red Antlers had been stuck to the wall.

With the moment of reprieve, Araneus returned his hands to their neutral position and transferred his sabers back to the middle hands. Carefully, he glanced at each of the stuck Antlers, which were struggling against their bonds. Hopefully, it would hold long enough for them to figure out how to get the possessor out, but-

“Father, behind you!”

Araneus whirled around before he really registered who had called out to him, his mind still in battle mode and more focused on the immediate threat than the fact that Joronia was not in a saferoom like he had asked. In front of him (how did it get this deep in the castle already?) was a blob of darkness floating in the air. A ring of orange spheres outlined a steadily staring eye, set in a sphere of pure blackness. Araneus started to move forward, his saber striking out to run the thing through, but a beam of light from elsewhere in the hallway got there first.

The white laser of light magic slammed into the darkness, slamming it into the wall. The combination of Joronia’s magic and the blunt force trauma killed it on impact, splattering it across the stonework like a rotten grape. With the immediate threat taken care of, Araneus allowed himself to relax his stance a bit, but a stern expression grew on his face. Turning to face his daughter, he gave her and Taranza an unimpressed glare.

The young court mage seemed sheepish, at least, his embarrassed and ashamed blush even seeming to reach up to his horns. “I tried to stop her, Your Majesty, but-”

Araneus raised his top right hand, and Taranza promptly shut up. He didn’t want to hear any excuses right now, just explanations. “Why are you not in one of the saferooms?” he asked Joronia.

His daughter huffed, lowering her staff a bit. The ruby embedded at its tip was still glowing with residual magic. “The royal family needs to appear strong to the people. If I spend this crisis hidden away in some panic room, what does that say about us?”

Araneus sighed, tempted to rub the sides of his head just below his own horns in annoyance. “The people also require leadership,” he said. “The royal family’s strength is why I am here, so I will not have you risking your life alongside me.” He gestured to the splattered remains of the piece of darkness. “These seem like they can’t go through walls, so you’ll be safe in a locked room with no windows. Please, just go to one of the saferooms with Taranza.”

The standoff continued for a few moments, neither Araneus or Joronia willing to give an inch on this. That sort of stubbornness had been something she inherited from him, but eventually one of them had to break, and Araneus had far more experience in providing disappointed stares. Joronia huffed again and turned around, likely seeing the logic in his plea but unwilling to acknowledge it.

“Fine then. Come, Taranza, let’s go.”

Taranza gave his king another sheepish smile and mock salute before following off after the princess. Once the two of them were around the corner and out of sight, though, Araneus didn’t relax. A sudden cracking sound drew his attention to where he’d left his possessed guards, and his jaw dropped at seeing what was happening to one.

The Antler’s exoskeleton was bending in unnatural ways, and Araneus would not be ashamed to admit that he felt queasy looking upon it. He seemed uncaring of the blood seeping out of the new cracks, or of the fact that he seemed to be crunching in on himself to slip out of the sticky webbing. He landed on the ground, but at that point his body must have been damaged beyond repair. Even a maxim tomato wouldn’t be able to help, at this state; the Antler’s entire thorax and abdomen seemed to have shrunk, with shards of his exoskeleton sticking out at angles that were so, so wrong.

Uncaring that its host was actively dying, the thing possessing the Antler launched forward towards his dropped sword, and Araneus was too far away to stop it. Gripping the weapon, it showed that, unfortunately, it could learn enough to access its host’s magic. It sent two fireballs towards the other two bound guards, burning through Araneus’s webs and freeing them.

That proved to be too much for it, though, and the Antler dropped to the ground, dead. The blob of darkness that emerged from it promptly got a saber to the eye as Araneus angrily launched forward, stabbing straight through it and pinning it to the wall behind.

Unfortunately, the king didn’t have much time to grieve his fallen guard, as the other two, still being possessed, rushed him with both their swords and fire spells of their own. Araneus immediately had to fall back, ill-prepared to deal with the guards’ sudden use of magic. Especially fire magic, which his own best spells, his webs, would be unsuccessful at countering for obvious reasons.

Still, even as he moved backwards, countering sword strikes where possible and dodging when not, he made sure to lead them away from the saferooms. As far away from possible, even, all the way up a staircase and onto the roof of the castle. That, though, proved to be his undoing.

Down to a single sword and becoming increasingly exhausted, Araneus was too focused on the two guards he was fighting to notice the lone Spynum on the roof. He didn’t notice her eyes, which had gone black from the darkness. He didn’t notice her nock her arrow. He didn’t notice her loose the string.

He didn’t notice the arrow flying true until it had already sealed his fate.

There was a sharp pain in his chest and back that forced him to drop his sword, and Araneus looked down. The arrow had been shot with enough force to pierce the exoskeleton on both his back and chest, impaling him completely. The sudden shortness of breath he was feeling probably indicated that it had pierced one of his lungs, and he started drifting downward as the power needed to keep him afloat started to fail him.

His adversaries seemed to judge that as being enough, leaving him on the roof to die. There, at the top of Royal Road, Araneus was able to look out upon his kingdom. Endless Explosions seemed to have even more explosions than normal, and if he strained hard enough he would have been able to barely see Wild World through the clouds. The giant red eye in space stared down from above, unblinkingly. Just how many of his citizens had already fallen to the darkness? How many would perish before this hell was over?

Despairing, Araneus collapsed to the ground as the last of his energy fled. A crisis of this magnitude was something that none of them were prepared for. In the back of his mind, as his thoughts started to go cloudy and his vision blackened from blood loss, he wondered if Joronia would even have a kingdom left to rule over.

Feeling like a failure of a ruler in his final moments, King Araneus IV of Floralia breathed his last.

“Doc, what in the world is this thing?” Daroach shouted as he jumped back, Storo’s fist punching through the table he had been sitting at mere moments before. The gust of wind that the blow kicked up sent his cloak billowing, and he took a second to glance back at the small white mouse with him. “And where did Spinni get off to?”

“Do I look like I know the answer to either of those questions?” Doc asked, yelping as Storo’s (or the thing possessing him, at least; Daroach could tell that the mouse wasn’t at the wheel anymore) attention turned to him. Quickly, Doc dove to the side, grabbing a discarded chair to use as a makeshift shield. It worked—partially—since it broke with one blow from Storo and sent Doc flying, but it bought enough time for Daroach to activate the Triple Star Cane. He quickly launched all three of his summoned star-shaped projectiles at Storo, sending him stumbling backwards and letting Daroach rush over to help Doc up from where he was sprawled on the ground.

“Where’s your saucer,” Daroach asked, given that they had a moment or two of reprieve.

“In the damn ship,” Doc hissed, wincing as he moved his arm to point towards where the Squeak Squad’s airship was docked.

Well, “docked” perhaps wasn’t the best term for it, since there weren’t any docks they could dock the ship to! They’d touched down in a clearing barely large enough for Doc’s magnum opus to fit, but they made it work. They had all been outside when this darkness started raining down from the sky, though, planning out their next heist. They probably could’ve done it inside, but all of them, even Doc, were a bit sick of machinery after their latest heist on Mekkai (the chaos of the ongoing revolution there made it all too easy for them to slip in and grab some of their experimental tech for Doc to tinker with).

Storo charging at them again snapped Daroach out of his wandering thoughts, but thankfully another few shots from the Triple Star Cane kept him at bay for now. Supporting Doc as he limped towards the ship (clearly that hit had been bad—Daroach didn’t want to think about what would’ve happened if it had connected without the chair in the way), Daroach kept an eye out for anything amiss.

That awareness probably saved his life, as he saw a glint of metal through the trees and immediately ducked. The ninja star that would’ve embedded itself in his neck instead sailed just above his head, nicking his ear and swiping his hat off of his head. Daroach growled a bit at that as he sent a retaliatory shot of Triple Stars into the woods. He’d liked that hat, and getting a new one made would cost a pretty penny.

Still, though, there were currently more pressing matters at play than his fashion. “Found Spinni,” Daroach said as he rose back to his full height, practically dragging Doc the rest of the way to the airship.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Doc grunted as they entered.

As soon as they entered, Daroach whirled around and fired another shot, stopping Storo (who had begun rushing at them) in his tracks long enough for him to slam the airship’s door shut and lock it. “There,” Daroach said, his claws clicking together as he dusted off his paws, “now let’s get you a maxim tomato and your saucer so we can properly fight back.”

Doc failed to respond.

His eyes narrowing, Daroach quickly turned around to see that his compatriot had vanished. Carefully, and keeping his back to the wall to prevent a possible flank, he looked around. Stars above, had the darkness gotten inside the ship without them noticing? He wasn’t sure when they could’ve, but he supposed that it was possible. If they had, then Doc may have gone the way of Spinni and Storo.

A skittering sound to his right snapped Daroached attention to something falling towards him. He barely twirled out of the way in time to avoid Doc’s attack, and the mouse slammed fist-first onto the floor. Daroach winced a bit at the crack that rang out, but given that his previous injuries seemed to be fully healed, whatever was possessing him seemed to be able to heal him.

Doc got back to his feet and looked at Daroach with pitch black eyes, his goggles having fallen off somewhere in the chaos. His bushy green mustache twitched, and that was all the warning Daroach got before something slammed into his left side.

He managed to avoid slamming directly into the wall—though barely—by twisting with the blow and bracing his feet, which granted him view of his new assailant. Just like the others that had rained down from the sky, it was a floating blob of darkness, a single unblinking eye set in the center. Daroach felt drained just from the proximity, but still planned to respond to whatever attack it was charging up with the orange spheres around it starting to glow.

He didn’t get the chance to counter, though, as Doc leapt at him unnaturally fast, sinking his teeth into Daroach’s right paw and forcing him to drop the Triple Star Cane. Without that to defend himself, the dark laser speared out from the blob with no resistance, knocking the air out of Daroach’s lungs and definitely breaking something on impact with the wall.

Before he could even think to get out of the way and get to the airship’s maxim tomato stash, the darkness rushed him. His vision went entirely black for a few moments, and seconds later Daroach was a passenger in his own body.

Running for her life from blobs of darkness descending from the sky was not how Adeline had planned on spending her Saturday. She’d planned on finishing up her painting of Kracko, then building a campfire to cook a nice lunch of canned fruits and vegetables, before maybe spending the afternoon down at the shore of Cloudy Park. It was a nice day, especially with Kracko having left Cloudy Park for a while after his defeat at the hooves of the purple horse creature. She wasn’t sure where he went, exactly (she assumed that he’d likely gone back to Grape Garden to recuperate, but she was hardly an expert on tracking the cloud golem’s movements), but his absence was a boon.

Or at least, it had been. Adeline would sure take being defended by the proper Kracko right now, given that her half-finished painting that she’d hastily animated had done a poor job holding off the darkness. Granted, given that Kracko seemed to have fallen earlier to a single one of these things (and it had to be the same thing that happened two days ago; the current despair and hopelessness clawing at Adeline’s heart was far too similar to the sheer apathy from earlier to be a coincidence), she wasn’t sure how much of a help he’d be.

Adeline had been forced to abandon her easel after animating the Kracko painting, however, so her options were slim anyway. She still had her brush and palette with her, at least, so her current goal was getting up into the clouds near the peak of Cloudy Park’s mountain. In a pinch, anything would do as a canvas for her art, but Popstar’s clouds were easier to paint on than a cliff face.

Unfortunately, it was looking like she wouldn’t even get the option. The darkness had gotten past her Kracko imitation rather quickly, and she was coming upon the steepest part of the trail up the mountain. Still running as hard as she could, she frantically dipped her brush in her blue paint. Once she reached a flat enough part of the sheer cliff to her right, she skidded to a stop and jabbed the brush out and onto the rock.

Without any water to wash the paint off, she’d have to stick to something monochrome. Thankfully, she had just the creature in mind to paint that fit that criterion, but it would be a rush job. The darkness was bearing down on her fast, so she couldn’t afford to waste any time with corrections or small details. The broad strokes, at least, would be enough for her magic to animate it properly, albeit far weaker than the real thing; both the canvas of rock and shoddy illustration would contribute to that fact.

Still, merely forty seconds after Adeline began painting, various shades of blue shimmered in the light as the facsimile of the Ice Dragon peeled itself off of the wall with barely ten seconds to spare. She could feel the drain on her stamina as her magic fueled the animation, but Adeline forced it to the back of her mind as she left the dragon behind to fend off the two (when had a second one showed up?) blobs of darkness.

The roar of her creation faded into the background as blood rushed through her ears. Her lungs burned for air and her legs protested every movement, but she did not allow herself to stop running. Despite her light green smock and black shoes not being built for running at all, she kept at it. Even as she felt her Ice Dragon get destroyed minutes later and knew that the darkness was after her once again, she kept running.

Adeline didn’t allow herself to stop until she’d reached the clouds, accessible near the summit of Cloudy Park. Brushing dark brown, almost black locks out of her eyes and keeping a hand on her red beret to keep the wind from blowing it off, she scanned the area. The darkness didn’t seem to be up there yet, the cloud cover above her obscuring her view of that disturbing red eye. Satisfied that she wasn’t under immediate threat, she prepared to dig in and paint like her life depended on it.

Adeline had already lost one home. She was going to her damndest to make sure that she didn’t lose another.

Still keeping an eye out for any approaching darkness, she examined her palette. That emergency Ice Dragon had used up most of her blue paint, unfortunately, so making another one was out of the question. Thankfully, the clouds could wash off her brush so she wasn’t limited to monochrome anymore, but a lot of her white paint was gone too. Fortunately, the clouds themselves were white enough to substitute, though at the expense of it taking more out of her to animate something like an imitation of Kracko.

Looking at the rest of her palette, she went over her options. Her stores of red, brown, orange, black, green, and yellow paint were all doing fine, so Sweet Stuff, Mister Shine, Mister Bright, Whispy Woods, and quite a few smaller creatures were on the table. Immediately, though, Adeline discarded the prospect of painting Whispy—he was just too big and the cloud cover would greatly limit a tree, even a painted one—and most of the smaller creatures—they just didn’t pack enough punch relative to the amount of paint she’d have to use.

She supposed that she had enough white paint to mix into the red to possibly get away with animating an imitation of Chuchu, but she rejected that idea as well. Chuchu was just too complicated to paint accurately in a high-stress situation like this, and Adeline needed accuracy to expend as little energy as possible when animating.

Right, so that left her with three options that she could paint accurately from memory at the moment: Mister Shine, Mister Bright, and Sweet Stuff. Kracko was available as a last-ditch effort, given how much it would take for her to animate him. Before she could deliberate on which to paint first, though, she was out of time.

A scream from above gave her only seconds of warning to look up before something very green and very fast pierced the clouds, pursued by no fewer than three blobs of darkness. Frantically, Adeline got to work on painting to help out, jamming her brush into her orange paint. Mister Bright was a circle—she’d make this as quick as possible.

Quite frankly, Pitch was the most terrified he’d ever been in his entire life. Even invading Dark Castle two days ago hadn’t been anything like this. That had been just one piece of the Darkness! But now Zero was here and everything was going wrong immediately! His bond with his ma hadn’t helped at all—despite both of their best efforts, they’d been separated almost as soon as the chaos started. He’d been frantically flying around for a few minutes now, doing his best to chase off the three blobs of Darkness on his tail.

There were enough clouds around to fashion arrows out of (a skill that the Darkness had used when possessing him, and one of the few things about his time under that Pitch was happy to remember), but unfortunately the Darkness just kept dodging them. Eventually, Pitch gave up that line of attack, since all it was doing was slowing him down, but that just left him flying around defenseless! His feathers couldn’t be shot out like Coo’s (the best he could use them for was as a duster!) and his atmokinetic abilities weren’t anywhere near refined enough to help in this case.

His screaming seemed to finally pay off and attract friendly attention, though, after bursting through one particular cloud layer. A few seconds after he did so, something orange streaked past him and slammed into the piece of Darkness closest behind him. Following that was something yellow, and Pitch pieced together what was going on with a surprised blink. What were Mister Shine and Mister Bright doing in Cloudy Park? And why was Mister Bright missing his fire?

Then a second Mister Bright whizzed past him to occupy the third blob, this one aflame in all his usual glory, and Pitch just got more confused.

Things got a bit weirder as he watched, since he noticed that Shine and the Brights looked like they were made of paint, of all things! There had to be magic involved, Pitch was sure, but he didn’t know from where until he scanned his surroundings a bit and looked down. Standing on the clouds was a creature he’d never seen before, gripping an artist’s brush and wearing a smock and beret to go with it. Curiously, though making sure to keep an eye on the ongoing fight, Pitch fluttered closer to the biped.

Once he was closer, he could see the strain on their face and the sweat dripping down it; whatever they were doing to animate the paint copies of Mister Shine and Mister Bright must’ve been taking a toll on them. Deciding to at least be polite to his savior, he spoke as he landed on her shoulder.

“Hi there!” Pitch chirped. “Ah’m Pitch!”

“Adeline,” she responded with a grunt.

Pitch mulled the name over in his mind. He felt like he’d heard it before…oh! The morning after they’d defeated the Darkness for the first time, he’d been pestering Chuchu about something or other, and she’d mentioned someone named Adeline! “Oh, do you know Chuchu?”

Adeline blinked. “You know Chuchu?”

Pitch nodded. “Mhm! Oh, since Ah’m Chuchu’s friend and you’re Chuchu’s friend, that makes us friends! Can I call you Ado for short, then?”

“Wha…” Adeline started, clearly confused, but shook it off quickly. “Sure, call me whatever.”

Pitch wasn’t sure why she was confused. His line of reasoning made perfect sense to him!

“So,” Ado asked, still clearly straining to keep her paint creations up and staring at the ongoing battle, “how’d you meet Chuchu?”

“We helped save the world together!” Pitch excitedly said. His expression fell immediately afterward, though, and he looked back at where the paintings were still trying to hold back the Darkness. “But, uh, it didn’t stick.”

Ado clearly wanted to ask something else, but she was interrupted by the cloud they were on shaking. Pitch instinctively took off, fluttering above Ado as she regained her footing. Her gaze snapped to where Pitch knew the entrance to the clouds was—ground-dwellers on Cloudy Park could reach cloud level by climbing up the mountain. Ado said something that was definitely a swear in some language Pitch didn’t know, and quickly filled her brush with brown paint.

It proved to be a great decision, because she’d just gotten the basic form down of a painting of a fish of some sort on the clouds before two blobs of Darkness came up from the mountain. Ado spent only a few seconds jabbing her brush down again for a spot of yellow paint, and the new anglerfish peeled itself off of the clouds and swam through them towards the Darkness. That bit of magic seemed to exhaust Ado even more, though. Her knees were shaking and she quietly swore again in that foreign language.

“That’s not gonna hold them for long,” Ado grunted, sweat once again beading on her brow. “You need to go.”

“What?” Pitch squawked. Surely his new friend wasn’t just asking him to leave her behind!

Ado gave him an unimpressed stare. “You can fly,” she reminded him. With her hands trembling, she cleaned off her brush before leaning down to start tracing an outline on the clouds. “I can’t. So I’ll hold them off while you escape and find help!”

Pitch’s eyes widened. Right! This wasn’t him abandoning her, it was a tactical retreat! He’d come back with reinforcements and rescue his mama and Ado! He just…had to figure out who those reinforcements should be.

Wait a second! Kirby! He could help!

Ado grunted again as a splattering sound rang out from above. Looking up, Pitch could see that the first Mister Bright painting had been defeated, orange paint raining down from where the Darkness had successfully ripped it apart. “Just go!” Ado cried, her painting nearly complete. A painting that Pitch was very quickly recognizing.

Ado fell to her knees as she completed the outline of Kracko, and Pitch could feel the buzz in his feathers as electricity started to fizzle around the edge of the paint. He took off as soon as the painting started peeling itself off of the clouds, and didn’t look back as thunder filled the air.

He knew that Ado would get possessed. She was already exhausted and going up against five pieces of the Darkness. No one was coming out of that with their mind their own, so he’d already failed in his self-imposed mission. But the best he could do now was keep flying.

Nago steadied his breathing, the shadows he was hiding in concealing his presence from the lone piece of Darkness in front of him. The bastards had come down from the sky far too fast for him to do anything about them getting to Red Canyon, and Shiro had been just the slightest bit too slow when the pair of them had tried to retreat to their den. Nago hadn’t been able to stop the Darkness from getting its claws into his girlfriend, and he hated himself for it.

But that fire in his heart at least kept the apathy at bay. And he had a goal: if the Darkness was going to stick to keeping Shiro on the island (especially given that he suspected the Rainbow Bridges were once again on borrowed time), it’d probably be the south side of the island, across the central mountain. There, Solaria’s light tended to shine more brightly and rain from Cloudy Park (which was a bit west-northwest of Red Canyon) rarely fell. As a result, very little grew there besides some cacti, and the south side of Red Canyon had effectively turned into a small desert. The locals tended to call it “Sand Canyon” colloquially, given how wind erosion of the constantly sun-baked rocks had turned the top layer into sand over time.

Nago never really had reason to go back there, himself. He knew that the canyon itself was generally shallower than on the north side of the island and that there was some pyramid built from black stone over there, along with the fact that Pon and Con had made a hope of it, but no more than that. Still, if that was where the Darkness had taken Shiro, that was where he’d go.

But he couldn’t do that alone. Nago knew that that would be unsuccessful at best and a suicide mission at worst. Instead, he was moving north at the moment. Kirby lived to the north, and though it would be a gamble, finding the puffball was the best chance he had. Princess Twilight was up that way as well, but if this was as worldwide of an event as he thought (and he tried so, so hard not to think of the giant eyeball in the sky, because every time he did he felt just a bit more empty inside), she would be occupied with Castle Dedede.

His best shot at getting through this and getting Shiro back would be to rendezvous with the others. Pitch, hopefully, wasn’t going through the same thing—stars know that the laddie had already been through too much at his age—but if he was, he’d likely have the same idea. Nago would swing through Iceberg first, and hopefully King Dedede would have already avoided possession. If not, though, he’d continue through and try to get to Grass Land as quickly as possible.

That, though, led to his current predicament. He’d have to move quickly to get through before the Rainbow Bridges shattered again (with so much apathy going around, he didn’t doubt that the Darkness would be targeting them), but moving too fast would get him caught and possessed. Hence, Nago was sticking to the shadows and controlling his breathing. He was almost at the Bridge between Red Canyon and Iceberg (and the cracks he could see already starting to form in it were not reassuring), and a single blob of Darkness blocked his path. Slowly, as to make as little sound as possible, Nago extended his claws and crouched to pounce.

Cats, after all, initially evolved as predators.

He leapt as the Darkness turned a bit, its eye scanning towards the Rainbow Bridge. Nago’s teeth sunk into the back of it, in the middle of the orange spheres circling it, and his claws came up before it could even try to retaliate. He wasn't sure how long he attacked it, ripping and tearing until it was nothing more than shreds of blackness staining red rocks. The sheer burning hatred he felt for the Darkness staved off the gnawing feeling of apathy. While it wasn’t nearly as effective of an emotion at warding off the Darkness as something like joy or love, which was part of why it took quite a while for him to properly kill the thing, Nago’s hatred was borne of love.

The Darkness had taken Shiro. It would pay.

Satisfied that the blob he’d just killed wouldn’t reconstitute itself anytime soon, Nago darted over the Rainbow Bridge to Iceberg as quickly as he could. He wasn’t sure if he could avoid the attention of that damned eye in the sky, but he could very well try. It would do him no good to get caught by the Darkness before even making it to Grass Land, after all.

Chuchu swam as hard and as fast as she physically could through the chilly waters of Iceberg. She didn’t dare look up ever since the first time she’d breached the surface. Even just looking upon Zero (and that had to be Zero, right?) left her feeling emotionally exhausted, like she’d be better off just giving up and letting herself fall to the bottom of the sea.

Ugh, even just thinking about it was letting the apathy creep in. Even that line of thought was dangerous!

Thankfully, her thoughts were soon interrupted by a blur of yellow shooting out of the darkness. It very nearly ran into her, and only Chuchu quickly twirling to the side stopped an impact that certainly would have hurt, even with neither party having bones.

With the yellow missile slowing to a stop and the water around it having a bit of time to still, the image Chuchu was seeing resolved itself into a yellow octopus. They had a permanent blush visible, and a sailor’s cap with a pink ribbon adorned their head.

“Nyupun?” Chuchu asked. “What’s going on?”

“Chuchu! Oh thank the stars you’re okay,” Nyupun said, Chuchu’s very presence seeming to calm them down a bit. “Ripple Field is under attack!”

“Merde,” Chuchu swore. “I was just heading that way to meet up with Kine. Is he still himself?”

Nyupun shivered a bit. “What…what do you mean by that?”

Chuchu sighed. She’d meant to tell Nyupun what was going on earlier, but she had been so busy searching for Adeline first (because at least she knew where Nyupun lived and could track them down later) to talk to them. “Two days ago, you know how there was the whole apathy thing going on?”

Nyupun nodded.

“That was the Darkness,” Chuchu elaborated, “and it can possess people. And now it’s back for round two.”

Nyupun hastily glanced around in all directions. “We need to go. It hasn’t come for us yet, right? Yeah, let’s just get out of here…”

Before they could shoot past Chuchu, though, she shot a tentacle out to stop them. “We only haven’t been targeted yet because we’re isolated targets and underwater,” she said. “And I don’t know aboot you, but I’m not letting these salauds take over lying down.”

Nyupun was silent for a moment as they thought. Eventually, though, they responded with something entirely unrelated to what Chuchu had been going for. “You know, I’m pretty sure Adeline has only taught you how to cuss in her language.”

Chuchu huffed, affronted. “I know more than just how to swear! She just agreed that it was important to know how to be properly vulgar so I could know if someone was insulting me!”

Nyupun stared at her, a confused expression on their face. “Okay, but you two are the only ones on the planet that speak it.”

Chuchu shook her head, deciding to just change the topic then and there. “Alright, we’re getting off topic. I’m heading to Ripple Field to help fight off the Darkness there. Are you coming or not, mon ami?” She stretched out a tentacle as an offer.

Nyupun seemed hesitant, but eventually reached out with one of their own tentacles, shaking Chuchu’s. Moments later, they were speeding off towards Ripple Field.

To say that Ripple Field was in chaos would be an understatement and a half. The Darkness had splashed down into the water like gannets diving for prey, immediately seeking out as many creatures as they could to possess. Brother was turned against brother as the organized structure Mine had built up for Ripple Field fell apart into a free-for-all, and Kine could only watch.

Oh, he and Mine tried to help out in fighting against the Darkness. They struck back when the initial wave came, and Kine’s ice was great for nonlethally trapping the possessed. But soon their efforts were for nought, as the Darkness just kept coming. And worst of all, it had possessed their main muscle.

Acro thrashed around, the orca’s great strength preventing anyone from getting close. Even the water around him churned and roiled as he moved, sending everyone, be they possessed by the Darkness or not, sprawling through the water. His eyes, just like everything else possessed by the Darkness, had gone black.

The worst of it was that he was preventing any hope of retreat, too. The water was just churning too much for anyone to even swim straight! Still, Kine and Mine fought on, hoping that something, anything would grant them some light to use against the Darkness.

That light came in the form of a pink torpedo.

Chuchu slammed into Acro with so much force that it actually stunned him for a moment, letting the waters calm enough for swimming to start coming easier again. A yellow torpedo followed, impacting with quite a bit less force than Chuchu had. Kine had seen the yellow octopus fellow around a bit before—what was their name again? Nyupun, right?

Regardless, that granted enough of a reprieve for Kine and Mine to properly collect themselves again and lend their own attacks to help. A flat sheet of ice sprang up near Acro and slammed into him too, while Mine physically swam up herself to slap him with her tail.

“Glad ta see youse’re in one piece!” Kine said once he was a bit closer to Chuchu and Nyupun.

“Same to you,” Chuchu responded. “So, what’s the plan, here?”

Kine frowned. “Well, I don't’ dink we can take ‘im on our own; Acro’s a bit outta our league. But we can’t retreat if ‘e’s setting the water like dis.”

“So,” Mine said as she swam back to them and Acro quickly started recovering from the assault, “youse need someone ta distract ‘im?”

Kine narrowed his eyes. Yeah, no way he was allowing this. “Mine, no.”

She gave her husband a slight smile. “Youse know more ‘bout this stuff than I do,” she said. “We need your mind intact more than mine.”

Kine gave his wife a stern look. “Mine, what youse’re suggesting…”

“She has a point,” Chuchu hesitantly said, warily looking at the now nearly-recovered Acro. “I don’t like it, but she has a point. We’re already friends with Kirby and the others, and if interpersonal bonds are the best help against the Darkness…”

“Mine and I are married,” Kine pointed out, annoyed.

Mine swam up and briefly pressed her lips to his. “I know that, hun,” she said as she backed away. “Dat’s why dat love will carry us through dis, and I know youse’ll come back to me.” Her expression was soft, which Kine supposed was meant to soften the blow of the despair and terror clawing at his heart. It didn’t work.

“I-I can stay too,” Nyupun piped up, a terrified but resolute expression on their face. “You need someone speedy to dart in and stun him.”

Acro roared as the Darkness finally got him moving again (perhaps he had been actively fighting back while stunned? Kine hoped so), and Mine didn’t give Kine any further option to argue against her involvement. Nyupun rushed in to stun Acro again, giving Mine just enough of an opening to join them. “Youse need to run!” she shouted after a moment where she could. “Get ta Kirby!”

Neither Kine nor Chuchu were happy about it, but they both listened to her command.

“Bloody hell, they just don’t stop coming, do they?” Coo asked, exasperated, as he fired feather after feather at the descending Darkness. It kept them away from him, for now at least, in favor of them diving into Big Forest. Which wasn’t exactly a good thing, and it meant that he’d probably have to fall back and rendezvous with the others to have any chance of winning against this thing.

A rustle of leaves below him alerted him to an attack from Whispy, and Coo moved to the side to let the thrown Gordo sail upwards and into one of the attacking blobs of Darkness. The thing went straight through it, piercing the Darkness’s eye, and leaving a trail of dark residue across the sky (unfortunately, that would only kill it temporarily; these things seemed to be able to heal from most anything). Coo, though, at this point had no sympathy for the Darkness. After having been possessed by it himself and hearing what it was capable of from Meta Knight, he agreed that the parasites needed to be exterminated.

Perhaps, in a better world, they might be able to throw all of them at Kirby, and all of them might turn out like Gooey. But they had neither the time nor means to test if Gooey was simply a fluke, that some aspect of his creation allowed for Kirby to turn him. Instead, here Coo was, in the sky and uselessly flinging feathers that rarely even killed their targets. Often, they simply shrugged off the blows and continued on their way to the ground. Honestly, Coo felt like he was stuck in some endless struggle.

And then he made the mistake of looking up.

Zero—and there was no way that that eye ominously staring down at the planet like some angry god wasn’t Zero—continued to stare down unblinkingly. Immediately, Coo’s emotions started to flee him and the hopelessness began to set in even harder. Was he doomed to just stay here, shooting the Darkness down until he inevitably faltered. Wouldn’t it just be easier to stop fighting, to just give in and-

“Coo, watch out!”

A strong gust of wind from—albeit untrained and weak—atmokinesis forced him to look away and pushed him just out of the way of one of the descending pieces of the Darkness. A few seconds longer of despair and it would’ve had him.

The Darkness instead shot past and right towards the ground, where Whispy hit it with another Gordo. For a tree, he had extremely good aim with those things when he launched them.

Granted a slight moment free from the struggle, Coo looked towards where the wind had come from. Pitch, of all beings, had come to his rescue. He was panting like he’d just flown full force all the way from the other end of the Rainbow Islands. Which, now that Coo considered it, may very well be true. “You just blow in from Cloudy Park, chap?” he asked.

Hovering for a moment to recover some breath, Pitch nodded. “Ah’m trying to find Kirby.”

Coo looked out at the Darkness endlessly raining from the sky, noting a couple that got uncomfortably close and sending two air cutters after them (one failed to actually kill its target, but Whispy took care of that down below). “I have to agree that that is the best plan of action,” Coo stated. “We should rendezvous with Rick first. There’s safety in numbers, and we know prior bonds help combat the Darkness.”

“Mhm!” Pitch agreed, and the two of them swooped down below the canopy to properly talk to Whispy.

“We’re making for Grass Land,” Coo said once they were within hearing range.

There was a rumbling sound from beneath the sapient tree as he moved his roots around. “Understood,” he said. “I’ll join you.”

Pitch looked puzzled. “But…you’re a tree?”

Whispy laughed. Instead of speaking, that rumbling sound intensified as he suddenly moved, far faster than a literal tree had any right to. Coo had seen him move before, of course—it was hard to live in a forest near Dreamland and not have seen Whispy at some point—but he’d never actually seen the tree cross to a different island.

As Whispy moved through the earth, he plowed a trough behind him. His roots, though, took care of that, churning the earth in such a way that it filled itself back in, grass and all, to look like he hadn’t moved in the first place. If Coo wasn’t seeing the tree actively moving and weaving between his woody brethren, he would’ve said that it had always been stationary!

While they moved, though, they still had to pay close attention to the attacking Darkness. Whispy’s Gordos were enough to deal with most of them, thankfully, but a few that either slipped past them or took a different route fell to Coo’s feathers and cutter blades. Though in one case, even that wasn’t enough, and it took a last-ditch effort from Pitch throwing together a few of Whispy’s (rather sharp) leaves and managing to fire them like an arrow to fell the Darkness after them.

Soon, though, they were at the edge of Big Forest, staring out at the cliffs surrounding Grass Land. The waterfall still flowed, unperturbed by the ongoing crisis. Oddly enough, the fact that the river had kept chugging along calmed Coo at least somewhat; if it had stopped that would just be indicative of even more going wrong.

Now all that was left was to cross. Coo and Pitch could both fly, of course, but the former was still wondering how Whispy-

The ground prompt exploded in wood.

Whispy’s roots struck out, crossing the distance between Big Forest and Grass Land in only moments. With a grunt, Whispy heaved, yanking himself fully from the ground by anchoring his roots in the neighboring island. He moved fast, even faster than he had through the ground, and Coo and Pitch had to strain themselves to keep up with him. It took a bit over a minute for them to reach Grass Land, at that pace, and Coo found himself struggling to stay in the air once they reached their destination. Pitch, beside him, was actively listing!

“There,” Whispy said, seemingly satisfied with himself. “Now, you said you were searching for a Ri-WATCH OUT!”

Coo whirled around, seeing a piece of Darkness gunning for Pitch! He readied a storm of feathers, but he could tell that they wouldn’t reach in time. Whispy couldn’t fire a Gordo, either; the angle of approach had Pitch right between them! Instead, one of Whispy’s roots, still displaying that unnervingly fast speed, speared up from where it had just anchored itself and impaled the Darkness directly.

Unfortunately, that still seemed like the wrong thing to do.

Direct contact with the Darkness, even with something that by all logic should leave it dead, allowed it to take on a host. The blackness absorbed itself into Whispy’s root, and the tree began thrashing around, trying to prevent the parasite from taking control. After a moment, when it was clear that he would lose this struggle, Whispy met Coo’s eyes.

“Go.”

With no way for them to possibly prevent Whispy’s possession, he and Pitch were promptly off like the wind.

This was only their second encounter with the stuff, and Rick was already thoroughly done with the Darkness. So many of the animals on Grass Land had already been infected with the stuff, and the only thing that had kept them at bay from him and Pick so far was them sticking close together. Like Meta Knight had said, close bonds acted as at least some of a deterrent, and those that got close anyway were lit aflame by Rick’s breath.

Still, both him and Pick knew that they wouldn’t be able to keep this up forever. The Darkness seemed to have infinite forces. In a battle of attrition, it would win. The only way to possibly beat it back would be taking the battle to it.

The only issue there was figuring out a way for that to be, well, possible. As far as Rick was aware, the only thing that could really put down the Darkness for good was magic, and some specific types of magic, at that. They could beat it out of a host, but making sure that it didn’t reinfect was a problem.

Rick’s fire breath speared out again, incinerating a piece of the Darkness that had gotten too close. It’d get back up eventually, but it bought him and Pick enough time to relocate again to get away from the constantly-reforming spheres of Darkness. It was something they’d already done multiple times, but this time something went wrong.

The Darkness had either wisened up to their plans or moved them up on the priority list, because they were suddenly rushed from two different directions. Pick didn’t have the same fire magic that he did and Rick couldn’t shoot fire in two different directions at once, but by the stars he tried. The piece of Darkness on the right was lit ablaze like the others, but as soon as he turned his attention to the left, that one swerved.

Right towards Pick.

Rick jumped forward, curling into a stone ball in some attempt to defend his girlfriend, but thankfully that turned out to be unnecessary. Instead of the Darkness worming its way into him—or worse, Pick—a purple feather speared down from the sky and diverted its path. It didn’t kill it, of course, only delay it, but an extra delay to that particular blob of Darkness came soon afterward. Coo wasn’t the only one of Rick’s friends to come to his and Pick’s rescue.

There was a loud hiss, and suddenly Nago pounced out of the shadows. Rick figured that he must’ve run all the way from Red Canyon, which was both impressive and rather concerning—the cat being alone was not a good sign, given that Rick had heard Nago go on and on about Shiro the morning after they saved Spike. Still, the cat was welcome there on Grass Land; the Darkness blob that he ripped to complete shreds wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon.

Chuchu and Kine crawling out of the nearby lake (Coo swooping in to pick the latter up) alongside Pitch flying down after Coo completed the set. All they needed now was-

“Friends!”

Everyone’s attention snapped to Kirby, who was running up to the assemblage of animals while wearing a bucket hat and holding a fishing rod. Gooey was following closely behind him—clearly they had been out fishing before this entire mess started. Despite the severity of the situation, Rick couldn’t help but smile. Kirby was here. They could finally start fighting back.

He was excited and relieved enough to pull Pick in for a quick kiss, and momentarily, Rick even forgot about the looming threat of Zero above them.

Quite a few factors came together, then, that every sapient being assembled was unaware of. The natural Dream pervading Popstar and the sheer amount of Heart each of the friends had, alongside them actively pushing back against the Darkness and, most importantly, the direct presence of a Voidspawn all combined to create something that the universe had not seen in a long time:

A Heart Star.

It seemed to almost flow into existence from Rick and Pick’s forms, creating a floating object that seemed to shift between a cartoonish depiction of a heart and a five-pointed star depending on how one looked at it. Curiously, and with no sense of caution for the new object that had suddenly just manifested itself into existence, Kirby leapt forward and touched it.

It seemed to shatter, though the calming presence they all were feeling didn’t go away. Instead, the pieces of the object (which Rick noted themselves looked like both hearts and stars) floated around Kirby’s arm for a moment before absorbing themselves into the little pink puff. For his part, he looked surprised for a bit before grinning, and his smile was contagious.

For the first time since the invasion began, Rick felt hope.

By the stars, this was hopeless.

“Montoya, how’re we looking,” Dedede growled as he swung his hammer again, splattering the piece of Darkness he was fighting against the wall. It wouldn’t last—it never did—but it felt good. The castle’s rooftop was a lost cause at this point; these things were coming from the sky, anyway. The fighting had moved inside, and so had he.

The blade knight winced as an explosion rocked Castle Iceberg. “The Poppy Bros. have fallen.”

“Ya think?” Dedede asked sarcastically. “How many are still fighting?”

“We’ve lost around half our troops by now,” Montoya said, dejected.

It’d been six minutes since the fighting started. Damn it all, they were getting utterly crushed. Why had Dedede thought that securing Castle Iceberg was a good idea? Ah, right, the Rainbow Bridges. The Rainbow Bridges that, at the moment, seemed to be doing nothing to deter the Darkness.

Unfortunately, King Dedede’s day was about to get worse, because his wide frame had blocked Captain Montoya from properly seeing behind him. If he had, maybe he would’ve been able to warn his king about the impending danger, and maybe Castle Iceberg would’ve lasted for another few minutes.

Instead, Dedede suddenly felt a blow to his back and, when he stumbled forward, he recognized the feeling that was suddenly pervading his senses. It was the exact same that he’d felt atop Dark Castle’s tallest tower—he was being possessed. Again.

His vision went entirely black in seconds.

Zero, Twilight decided, was an apt name for such a creature. Even with the Element of Magic pulsing, staring up at the eldritch abomination (because how else could she describe a blood red eyeball set in an amorphous black cloud the size of a moon?) from just outside the castle left her feeling empty inside. However, her emotions fleeing at least left her with her logic before the apathy would’ve set in.

Perhaps “Zero” didn’t quite capture the full scale of this…thing’s power, Twilight idly mused, unable to tear her gaze away. A word felt too full—a full four letters didn’t feel empty enough. Even the numeral itself, 0, had its uses mathematically as the additive identity and existed. To truly capture the sheer lack of anything she was feeling, Twilight pondered, perhaps {} or ∅ would be more fitting names.

Then her gaze was broken as Spike pulled her down, and Twilight almost gasped for air with how her emotions returned to her. For a moment, it felt like she was drowning in feeling as the Element of Magic glowed an intense purple, going from nearly complete apathy to her normal range of emotion in an instant.

“Whatever you do,” she said once she’d recovered enough to speak, “don’t look at that thing. If it wasn’t for my Element I think I would’ve just given up on the spot.”

Bandee audibly gulped in fear, but he brought something up after that. “I…I don’t think that might be it. I was staring at it earlier and managed to recover myself…” He considered something for a moment. “Princess, it might be targeting you.”

Twilight sucked in a breath. “I was one of the ones who took down the Darkness that was here two days ago,” she realized. Her eyes widened. “Kirby and Meta Knight are in danger.”

“We have to warn them!” Spike said.

Twilight locked eyes with Bandee. “Do we still have the communicator that Meta Knight gave us when we fought Nightmare?”

Bandee shook his head. “We gave that back as soon as construction on the boxing ring was finished! Apparently they have a really limited supply of the things with a long enough range to reach from their complex to here.”

“Horseapples,” Twilight swore. “We’ll need to make sure Castle Dedede is secure before finding him or Kirby, then.” After a moment, she added, “Where is Kirby, anyway?”

Bandee and Spike both shrugged, and Twilight was forced to abandon that line of thinking for a moment when the skies opened and Darkness began raining down.

Bandana started backing up towards the grand doors of Castle Dedede, and Twilight was inclined to follow him. “We need to get inside. Now.”

Flaring her horn to quickly levitate Spike onto her back, Twilight whirled around and sprinted into the castle with Bandee. Her magic slammed and barricaded the doors shut behind them, and Twilight was thankful to see that the troops in the castle had properly positioned themselves. A horde of everything from Waddle Dees, Waddle Doos, Blade Knights, and Sir Kibbles to Pluggs, Broom Hatters, and even Bugzzy were assembled in the hall, staring at the door with anticipation. They were prepared to strike as soon as the Darkness broke down those doors.

Based on what was going on outside, Twilight gave them three minutes, at best.

“Princess, General!” a voice called for them as they broke past the crowd of warriors. Lieutenant Licht, the Plugg currently in charge of military operations in this wing of the castle, had been hailing them. “What in the world is going on out there?”

Glancing out the nearby window, Bandee paled. “By the stars there’s so many of them…”

Taking a quick look, Twilight had to agree. Darkness was raining down from the sky like an overdue storm, and it wasn’t just around Castle Dedede, either. There was a village not far from the foot of the mountain. How many innocent people would be taken by the Darkness before this was all over?

The door beyond the crowd shook threateningly, pulling Twilight out of her gloomy musing and forcing her to focus on the present. “Princess,” Bandee said, tightly gripping his spear as he, too, stared at the door, “you’re the only one here who can actually kill these things for good.” Shifting his gaze so that he could look at her directly while still keeping half an eye on the door—it just shook again, not a good sign—he continued. “We need to prioritize certain areas to secure.”

Twilight could feel Spike’s grip on her mane tighten as he came to a realization. “The kitchen,” he said. “It’s going to target the kitchen first.”

“Spike?” Twilight asked, concerned both for how he knew that and his tone of voice. “How do you know that?”

“When…when I was under,” he said, “I think I was seeing some of the Darkness’s memories when it was trying to shut me out.” Steadying his breath, he continued. “And one of the first things it would do on a planet is destroy anything the people could use to heal themselves even if they fought it off. Hospitals, pharmacies, drug manufacturers, you name it.”

Bandee’s eyes shot wide open. “And the kitchen is where we store our maxim tomatoes.” His gaze hardening, he nodded. “Princess, you and Spike should go and secure the kitchen, then work your way out and save us all from there.” He looked back at the door. “I’ll stay here and help fend it off.”

“What?” Twilight asked, incredulous. “I’m not leaving you here.”

“With all due respect, Sir,” Licht spoke up, “she’s right.”

Bandee looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

“With His Majesty off at Castle Iceberg,” Licht elaborated, “you’re the highest authority in the castle. If we lose you, we lose our central command.”

“This plan leaves me with no one to command,” Bandee countered. “A general without his army is just one man.”

“Whatever you decide, do it quickly!” Spike shouted, pointing towards the doors. The barricade was finally failing, and with a mighty crash, Castle Dedede’s grand doorway slammed open and its inhabitants sprang into battle.

“Just go!” Licht shouted, rushing forward to help his men.

Twilight immediately took off, and while Bandee seemed hesitant, he did follow her.

“The kitchens are downstairs,” Bandee said as the sounds of battle faded into the background behind him. Twilight, at this point, had a decent mental map of Castle Dedede, but the reminder was nice, regardless. “Fastest way there is going to be through the central staircase and past the boxing-”

Before he could finish his sentence, every light in the castle, usually powered by a team of Pluggs under Dedede’s employ, shut off. The Darkness must’ve already gotten to them, probably worming its way in through a window. As a result, Castle Dedede was plunged into darkness, with only some light creeping in through the windows.

It didn’t slow them down at all, though. There was enough light to still see, albeit barely, and they kept running as Twilight cast a light spell.

What did slow them down—stop them in their tracks, even—was the floating ball of Darkness in front of them, illuminated by Twilight’s spell. She reacted immediately and violently, her horn and the Element of Magic both glowing intensely as she fired out a magical laser. The magic enveloped the Darkness in mere moments, and it was almost eerie in that it didn’t scream in pain as it was completely disintegrated.

If she could help it, Twilight wasn’t even going to be leaving any residue behind, this time.

Unfortunately, that slowing down cost them. Just as they started moving again, Bandee let out a yelp and tripped, prompting Twilight to look back. Bugzzy, his eyes as black as night, had leapt for him and grabbed ahold of Bandee’s foot. The general reacted quickly, jabbing his spear at the bug’s hand to force him to let go. It worked, but Bugzzy retaliated by grabbing the weapon in his mandibles before Bandee could properly retreat, forcing him to drop his spear.

Twilight was about to pitch in to help, reading another spell, but a possessed Waddle Doo launched out of the darkness at her, his beam at the ready, and she was forced to change her spell to a last-minute shield. By the time the Waddle Doo’s beam had been deflected, a myriad of other possessed residents of Castle Dedede had assembled before them, alongside multiple floating blobs of Darkness.

Bandee gulped, fetching another spear from whatever magical storage he used, and despite his obvious fear he stood resolutely against the crowd. “Princess,” he said, getting into a ready stance, “run.”

Hating herself for leaving a friend behind, despite knowing the logic behind it, Twilight ran. She tried to ignore the fact that Bandee was drawing most of the castle’s fire, tried to ignore the sounds of battle behind her as he must have been fighting tooth and nail to keep his mind, tried to ignore Spike’s small whimpers of fear as he pressed his face into her mane. It didn’t really work, but she still tried her best to focus entirely on getting to and securing the kitchens as fast as possible.

She wasn’t sure exactly how long it took her to get there—maybe one minute, maybe two—but Twilight was surprised that she encountered no further resistance on her way. They’d tried to seal up the castle as best they could, so most of the Darkness was forcing its way through the front doors. Still, given the power outage, some must’ve found a different way in, so the complete lack of resistance was concerning in its own right.

Reaching the kitchens, she found out why. The door slammed shut behind her and was magically sealed, and the only other person in the room was Chef Kawasaki. The purple light emanating from Twilight’s horn illuminated the chef’s blackened eyes, and worst of all was the shiny red maxim tomato on the cutting board that he had a large mallet raised over. Next to the board was a pile of what looked suspiciously like tomato paste.

Before he could bring the mallet down, though, Twilight wrapped it in her telekinesis and magically pushed, forcing the Darkness out of the man with her magic. As soon as it was free, her Element pulsed and sent out a beam of magic alongside her, completely erasing that piece of the Darkness from existence.

Kawasaki blinked in surprise, looking confused as to how he got there. When he saw the mallet in his hands and the remains of what must’ve been almost a dozen tomatoes, his eyes widened. “What…”

Before he could actually ask anything, Twilight cut him off, desperation leaking into her voice. “How many are left?”

Quickly, Kawasaki checked the box to his right that had contained the maxim tomatoes in the first place. “Twenty-six,” he reported. “There’s other food, too, but with the power out I’m not sure how long the stuff in the freezer will last.”

Twenty-six tomatoes and a small assortment of other healing items, some of which were on a time limit. Celestia damn it all, if that food spoiled then what was left wasn’t nearly enough for the entire castle to heal themselves if they were injured when all of this was over. Which would be a struggle in and of itself, since Twilight was pretty much the only thing that could excise the Darkness from Castle Dedede right now.

And as the sounds of battle outside of the kitchens began to die down, Twilight was left with the sinking feeling that the only beings left in Castle Dedede that hadn’t succumbed to the Darkness were Chef Kawasaki, Spike, and herself.

Applejack had already been having a poor start to her day when Fluttershy had come by in hysterics. She’d figured out pretty quickly that something was going on with Twilight by Fluttershy’s babbling about negative rainbow lights and Discord, but what, exactly, was going on had to wait until they gathered the rest of the Element bearers and made for Fluttershy’s cottage.

This time, they all fell through a hole in Discord’s ceiling and into a pained heap on the floor (except for Fluttershy, who inexplicably drifted down gracefully; Discord’s bias was as obvious as ever). Looking back up, Applejack noted that the hole they fell through was actually a full-sized door embedded into the ceiling, frame and all, that she was absolutely certain was not there before.

“Alright,” she said, dusting herself off a bit as she separated herself from the pony pile and stood. Fetching her hat, she placed it back on her head and looked towards the screen. “Now what’s goin’ o-WHAT IN TARNATION IS THAT?”

On the screen was a giant floating red eyeball embedded in some cloud of darkness. It wasn’t even in the same universe as her, and Applejack still felt ill and that something was viscerally wrong just looking at it.

“Zero,” Shining Armor, who Applejack just realized was sitting on Discord’s couch already, said quietly. “That’s…that’s Zero.”

Everypony was silent for a few moments before Pinkie spoke. “Is…is Twilight okay?”

“Twiggles has managed to avoid possession so far,” Discord piped up, holding up a secondary screen in his paw that showed Twilight and Spike standing in a darkened room with some orange creature that Applejack hadn’t seen yet. “Her little dragon has too. But well, they’re pretty much the only ones in Castle Dedede who have.”

“Wh-what about Sunset?” Fluttershy asked, nervously. As soon as she’d seen Zero, she’d darted behind the couch, only peeking up on occasion to see if this whole thing was just a nightmare.

Discord shrugged. “That’s what we were just about to check!”

Galaxia’s magic hummed as Meta Knight twirled, his blade clashing with a possessed Trident Knight. It was vexing, to say the least, how organized the Darkness was in its assault on the Meta-Knights’ complex. As soon as he got close enough to possibly work against the Darkness possessing his men with Galaxia, something else would drop on him to force him away. This time, it was a Chilly.

Meta Knight whipped his cape around to block the Chilly’s icy breath, taking to the air as the temperature continued to drop around him. Two small tornadoes sprang into being as he swung his sword, one dropping down towards the little snowman and the other moving up to target a Birdon that was flying at him. The possessed bird didn’t even squawk as they were carried away by the wind, but now, in the air, Meta had a bit more time to survey the situation.

He was careful not to look up, of course. When he had first gazed upon Zero, even with Galaxia working against its manipulations to prevent him from descending into outright apathy, he had been struck with such a feeling of hopelessness and despair that he almost hadn’t dodged out of the way of one of the incoming blobs of Darkness. He hadn’t even managed to do so on his own, even; Miss Shimmer had physically pulled him out of the way before being dragged into a battle of her own.

He wasn’t quite sure where she was now, even. Meta Knight thought he saw a flash of orange, though on a second look that turned out to just be a rather large butterfly. As he was scanning the ground to look, though, the clanking of metal caught his attention. Someone—probably Captain Vul—had released one of the new Heavy Lobsters to combat the threat.

Speaking of Vul, he, at least, was easy to spot in the chaos. He stood taller than most other creatures on Popstar, and the distinctive white clothes he preferred to wear and his beard made him stand out among the Darkness. He hadn’t been possessed yet, thankfully, and he was carefully scanning his surroundings for Darkness as he messed with a device that Meta knew was used to command most of his creations.

Sure enough, the ground exploded a ways away where the Darkness had gathered a particularly large force. Another of Vul’s designs, the Heavy Mole, dug its way out of the ground in the process, the spinning ends of its digging arms felling blob after blob before they even reached the ground. Vul, thankfully, wasn’t using it to target their possessed men.

A flash of Darkness caught Meta’s eye, though, and he saw a blob that was spearing directly towards Vul. He immediately started flying after it, but his initial position had been suboptimal; the Darkness would reach and possess Vul long before he could kill it with Galaxia. Or it would have, had it not been for an orange unicorn disengaging from a fight she was involved in (ah, that was why Meta hadn’t seen her yet; she was surrounded by similarly orange Scarfies and Waddle Doos) and teleporting next to Vul in a flash of aquamarine light.

Sunset, maintaining her momentum from before her teleport, pushed Vul out of the way of the Darkness, saving him from possession. Unfortunately, that now left her in the Darkness’s path and Meta was still too far away.

The blob of Darkness slammed into Sunset, knocking her to the ground and unfortunately immediately absorbing itself into her. She seemed to realize what was happening and tried to react by punching herself in the face—an act that would’ve been slightly amusing had the circumstances not been so dire—but that failed to actually do anything.

Within seconds, her light blue eyes had turned black, from the pupil to the sclera. Meta Knight pumped his wings harder, trying to at least mitigate some of the damage by maybe stabbing one of her limbs with Galaxia, as her horn began to flare with aqua light. Oddly, though, her horn light was flickering, and an expression like she was trying to figure out a particularly tough puzzle crossed her face.

The magic promptly sputtered out a few seconds later, and Meta thought that, perhaps, the Darkness simply could not use Equestrian magic. He should have known that it was foolish to have such hope in this situation. Instead, he was given pause when something truly unexpected happened.

Her eyes, completely unlike everything Meta thought he knew about how the Darkness worked, regained color. They didn’t turn back to her natural turquoise, though. Instead, they turned a solid toxic green, and purple wisps of some gaseous substance began emanating from them. The magic that started to run up her horn wasn’t its natural color either. It was jet-black and seemed to roil unnaturally, like the universe itself was trying and failing to stamp the magic out.

Meta Knight landed as the purple substance started pouring out of Sunset’s horn as well, unsure of how to proceed. This was completely uncharted territory, and he was wary to approach some unholy fusion of Equestrian magic and the Darkness.

Then Sunset’s radioactive green gaze turned towards him, and he was pulled into this mess anyway.

A black aura wrapped around his right arm, and Meta Knight involuntarily let out a low scream of pain. Whatever spell the Darkness had cast left his arm in agony, like every nerve ending in his arm was individually being seared with a branding iron. Even his years of training couldn’t protect him from his mind immediately focusing on nothing but the pain, and it was a miracle that he didn’t black out.

That loss of focus let the Darkness-possessed Sunset get close, and her left forehoof slammed into Meta’s mask. The force of the blow launched him backwards multiple meters, and combined with the sheer pain his arm was in, he reflexively dropped Galaxia as he flew.

That, at least, got the Darkness to release whatever pain spell it was using. He was still left almost paralyzed from it, though, and his eyes widened when he looked back up to see Sunset’s body charging up another spell, the blackness around her horn churning wildly. He likely would have been a goner had it not been for another of his officers that had so far escaped possession.

Sailor Dee, her own battles having led her inside and just having been launched through a medical closet and the window of the infirmary, ran towards the confrontation with the closest thing resembling a weapon she could find. She reached Sunset just before the Darkness unleashed its spell, jumping up and jabbing a syringe (that Meta hoped was a tranquilizer, but he was not naïve enough to downright assume so) into Sunset’s shoulder, Sailor pushed the Darkness enough to change its spell’s trajectory.

Unfortunately, now Sailor was uncomfortably close to the Darkness as its spell shot out. It was a fire spell of some sort, black flames jutting out from Sunset’s horn. The very air itself seemed to burn, and even with the flames missing him, Meta Knight could feel the temperature rise to nearly unbearable levels. And Sailor Dee had been right next to its source—with the way she was swinging after jabbing the syringe into Sunset, her right foot even got caught in the direct path of the spell itself.

A concussive spell followed, unceremoniously flinging Sailor off of Sunset. The whole thing bought Meta Knight enough time, though, to recover and grab Galaxia (this time with his left hand—his right was still almost non-functional from the earlier spell). He rocketed towards Sunset, intending to get the Darkness out of her, but before he could reach her she vanished. There was the tell-tale pop of teleportation that, instead of giving off light, seemed to suck in the light around it and make the surroundings darker. The Darkness had escaped with Sunset’s body to stars know where.

Quickly pivoting priorities, Meta Knight flew back to where Sailor had landed. Her right foot was just gone, incinerated by the Darkness’s spell, but the wound itself had been cauterized. She wouldn’t bleed out, at least, and she had been knocked unconscious by the concussive spell, so she wasn’t feeling the pain at the moment. Still, she was majorly at risk, and even the healing that maxim tomatoes offered wouldn’t regenerate a lost limb.

Vul ran up, his face pale. “Is she…”

“She’s alive,” Meta Knight assured. “But she needs medical attention. Has the Darkness taken our tomatoes?”

“I was with Mace and Axe Knight when the Darkness struck,” Vul explained. “Mace was one of the first ones possessed and I think Axe wasn’t far behind—with their memories there’s no way that we have any tomatoes left by now.”

“Shit,” Meta Knight swore. He looked down at Galaxia, the gem still pulsing with a failing effort to push back the Darkness. Looking around at his complex, seeing more and more of his men get possessed, he recognized that the situation was hopeless there. “I can’t kill the Darkness here alone, and Castle Dedede may have some maxim tomatoes left. Princess Twilight would likely prioritize protecting those.”

Vul met Meta’s eyes, seeing what his boss was getting at. After a moment, he steeled his expression and nodded. “I’ll hold the line, Sir,” he said, drawing his personal weapon, a blunderbuss that he’d been carrying around since Meta Knight had debriefed them about the threat of Zero. Turning around, he aimed and fired at an approaching blob of Darkness, dropping it for a few seconds as the noises of the Heavy Mole and Heavy Lobster continued to ring out in the background. “Good luck.”

Meta gave Vul a resolute nod before gathering the injured Sailor Dee in his arms, careful to avoid poking her with Galaxia. He flared his wings, taking off as fast as he could towards Castle Dedede.

In space, the Whole watched as the last of itself that it could spare flew down to the planet below. This whole process would go a lot faster and a lot smoother if it could go down there with its full power, but the peskiness of the Dreamwater prevented that. It was no matter, though. Nearly half of the planet was already under its control.

Within a week, Stellarium would fall.

Author's Note

So, remember when I had Twilight think about how Gooey's use of her magic reminded her of Sombra? Yeah, that was foreshadowing.

Also, I uh, didn't mean for this chapter to be over 13,000 words long. I just started writing it beacuse I wanted to get an early start on it and I'm excited to write the DL3 arc, and uh...yeah. There was a lot to cover this chapter and I wound up even cutting some parts from Chuchu and Kine's segments, and it was still absurdly long. Next chapter should be shorter. Probably. Maybe. It also probably won't happen as quickly, because I think I need to take a few days' break after writing this monstrosity lol.

Oh, and a quick mention, with this chapter aPPPPoPP has breached the 200,000 word mark! Thank you all for sticking with this fic for so long, and here's to the future!

See y'all next time!

Chapter XXXV: Four

Discord’s living room was dead silent. Shockingly, even the draconequus himself didn’t make a sound. Fluttershy had ducked behind the couch the moment that the Darkness had possessed Sunset, so she missed a lot of what happened. Still, though, when she poked her head back up and saw Meta Knight flying off with an injured (by Celestia’s mane was she missing a foot?) Sailor Dee with Sunset nowhere to be found, she put some things together. She did not like the mental picture it conjured.

“I…I think I’m going to be sick,” Rarity said, visibly green. A trash can appeared near her in a flash of light, though thankfully for everypony’s ears and noses, her nausea didn’t come to pass.

“What the hay was that?” Rainbow asked.

“Just about the worst case scenario, Ah’d reckon,” Applejack answered, her voice somewhat bereft of emotion. Fluttershy figured that her mind was either unwilling or unable to comprehend the sheer magnitude and direness of the situation enough to properly assign the emotions she should be feeling. She understood; she was in much the same boat.

“It’s…not the worst case possible,” Shining Armor spoke up, clearly deciding to focus on topics that he was secure in. His voice still betrayed the worry he was obviously feeling, though. “Discord, could you put Twily back on screen?”

Discord snapped his tail, for once not complaining about being asked to do something. Fluttershy hadn’t known him for long—it’d only been a few months since his reformation, really—but she liked to consider him a close friend. And him being so subdued was concerning.

She would have to ask him about it after this was over, though. She didn’t think she could bring herself to actually speak at the moment.

“How…” Pinkie began, uncharacteristically solemn, “how could this be worse?”

“Twily has a proper base of operations and secured all the healing items in the castle,” Shining elaborated, seemingly defaulting to talking tactics. “And while I don’t have full knowledge of Castle Dedede’s layout and it being downstairs isn’t the best position for a tactical advantage, the hall leading into the kitchens seems easily defensible and is a choke point.”

“And since the Darkness knows that it can’t just storm in, because that choke point will let Twilight just annihilate them!” Rainbow added. “So that lets her go on the offensive!”

“Exactly,” Shining nodded. “And because any of the Darkness’s forces that she defeats get converted to her side, she still has a chance of taking back the castle!”

The first order of business for Twilight was boarding up the few windows that Castle Dedede’s kitchens had. They were already closed, and with the door shut and locked there probably wouldn’t be any additional Darkness blobs worming their way in, but she didn’t want to take any chances. This room was, for the time being, just about the only place in the castle that Twilight trusted; everywhere else was probably crawling with the Darkness by now. With the windows properly sealed, she began pacing while trying to put together a plan.

She could, in theory, go around the castle and destroy pieces of the Darkness one by one. But Castle Dedede was currently housing about two hundred or so residents, so purging the Darkness from each and every one of them would take time. She needed to prioritize…

Twilight’s eyes went wide as a sudden thought crossed her mind. “Chef Kawasaki,” she said, “how long do we have before the food in the fridge starts to spoil?”

Kawasaki, who had been steadfastly watching the door while she and Spike boarded up the windows, jumped a bit in surprise when Twilight called for him. “Oh! Uh…four, maybe five hours?”

Alright, so they were on a time limit if they wanted to make sure that everyone in the castle got adequate medical attention once this was over. “That should be our first priority, then,” she acknowledged. “But going to turn the power back on would leave the kitchen undefended…”

“So what do we do?” Spike asked.

Think, Twilight, think! she mentally berated herself. They could split up and she could go alone to turn the power back on, but doing that would leave Spike and Kawasaki vulnerable to possession. She could, in theory, teleport back to the kitchen if something happened, but constantly teleporting back and forth between the kitchen and the last safe point in the hallway she’d found would take more energy than she was willing to waste. Plus, she’d need a way to even know if something went wrong…

Wait, that’s it!

“Spike, your messenger flame!” Twilight exclaimed.

Spike blinked in surprise. “What about it?”

Twilight mentally backed up a bit, realizing that she might’ve skipped over some reasoning. “Alright, so you know how when the Darkness first possessed you, you teleported?”

Spike shivered a bit at the reminder, but looked confused. “I…maybe? But what does that have to do with my messenger flame?”

“It never teleported any other time, even when it would’ve been advantageous for it,” Twilight elaborated, “and I think that’s because its other hosts just couldn’t teleport anything at all! I think it could only teleport with you because of your messenger flame, which means that the flame affects it!”

Spike’s eyes widened as he came to the same conclusion she had. “So if someone comes for the kitchens, we force the Darkness out of them and I can send it to you!”

Twilight nodded, though Chef Kawasaki chose then to speak up. “So, how do we force these darkness thingies out of people?”

Twilight fell silent for a moment, trying to figure out how best to answer that before just going for the blunt option. “Hit them hard enough that they abandon their host.”

Kawasaki looked concerned. “That’s…all we can do?” he asked.

“Basically,” Spike answered. “Unless they can force the Darkness out on their own, but I’m pretty sure that was a fluke with me…” He trailed off, looking down at his claws as some sparks jumped between them. Clenching them, he steeled his expression. “And I had outside help anyway! So let’s beat up the Darkness and take back the castle!”

Twilight was a bit less enthusiastic about the plan—leaving Spike alone in a castle infested by the Darkness was just about the last thing she wanted to do—but it was the best they had and they really needed to make sure that that food didn’t spoil. Plus, the majority of injuries happening in the kitchen made sure that the healing items were close by. Nodding and fully committing herself to her portion of the plan, she lit her horn and cautiously opened the door, ready to vaporize any piece of the Darkness that came through.

When nothing did and a check of the hallway revealed nothing coming their way, she turned back for a moment. “Good luck.”

“You too, Twi!” Spike said. “See you when the lights are back on!”

As much as Spike was aware that the lack of something happening was probably a good thing, it didn’t stop him from being bored while waiting. It was a strange set of emotions, really—he was terrified, sure, but enough so that it almost looped around into a sort of calm. But there was tension in the air at the same time, probably because something was almost guaranteed to happen at any moment and both Spike and Kawasaki were bracing for it. It almost reminded him of his time utterly failing at petsitting a couple months back (had they really only been in Dreamland for a month or so? It felt like so much longer), knowing that Angel Bunny was up to something but being incapable of stopping it, only reacting.

That was the sort of tension that permeated the air in Castle Dedede’s kitchens as the two of them waited. And waited. And waited. They had to know where they were, right? Meta Knight had said that the Darkness could probably communicate telepathically, and one of them had been possessing Kawasaki. But it had been nearly half an hour at this point without so much as a noise from beyond the door.

Then, just as Spike was beginning to consider that maybe Meta Knight had been mistaken, the door shook. Twilight had shut it on her way out and Spike had relocked it, but neither he nor Kawasaki were under the impression that it’d hold for long. Spike still wasn’t exactly sure what constituted a proper fighting stance for him—very few of his comics featured bipedal characters and he was pretty sure that comic book choreography wasn’t very realistic anyway—and he was shaking a bit as he shifted his right foot back and raised his fists. He might’ve had no idea what he was doing and still wasn’t sure of how to work with his new electric powers, but he sure as hay wasn’t going down without a fight.

Then the door was ripped off of its hinges and all Tartarus broke loose.

Bugzzy stood in the now-empty doorframe, having tossed the kitchen door aside. He was, thankfully, alone, though his eyes were the standard black of those possessed by the Darkness. There was a creaking sound as his elytra opened, and the buzzing of Bugzzy’s wings overtook Spike’s hearing as the beetle launched into the room.

Spike seemed to be the beetle’s first target, with him standing closer to the door than Kawasaki. Yelping, he spat out a lick of flame and dove to the side. He knew that he could probably take some hits from Bugzzy—his scales were rather tough, after all—but he was still keenly aware of his own stature. Regardless of his durability, Bugzzy was both bigger and stronger than him.

Besides, he also didn’t want to risk getting possessed again. It was an experience that he’d never repeat if he had anything to say about it.

The beetle did swerve to dodge the fire, smoothly moving to attack Kawasaki instead. The chef, to his credit, reacted quickly and used the first thing in range as an improvised weapon. Unfortunately for Bugzzy, that turned out to be a frying pan.

Spike winced as the cooking implement made contact with the beetle’s head. He knew that the Darkness couldn’t feel pain, but Bugzzy still stumbled back; the Darkness controlling him suddenly needed to redirect resources to shoring up its host’s dazed control center. Spike took advantage of the moment, thrusting his arms forward and trying to will lighting to spring from his claws and strike Bugzzy. That’s how electric powers worked in comics, after all!

Nothing happened.

Or, well, nothing that Spike wanted to happen happened. Instead, some sparks zipped between his claws and the air directly in front of his hands heated up a bit, but he failed to shoot lightning like a comic book character. In fact, his attempt at using his new powers backfired on him spectacularly, as all the electricity did was cause a flash of light and loud popping noise, sending Spike’s vision dancing with stars and making his ears ring.

Temporarily blind and deaf, Spike didn’t even see Bugzzy’s sudden strike coming. He could certainly feel it, though, when the beetle slammed into him. The Darkness was probably trying to body slam him, but it failed to account for Spike’s tail. The extra limb braced him against the floor, preventing the tackle from completely knocking him over. All it did, even, was get Bugzzy in range of Spike’s naturally sharp teeth.

And as he bit down on the limb closest to his mouth (which Spike hoped beyond hope was just an arm), he instinctively added a bit of fire to it as well. Bugzzy’s burned and pierced limb jerked back, oily black hemolymph dripping from part of it that had been ripped off in the process. Spike, thankfully, didn’t actually taste any of it, as the pieces of exoskeleton and tissue that he’d ripped off had been incinerated before they even hit his taste buds. He still felt terrible for a moment, given that Bugzzy didn’t really deserve any of this, but he’d do what he had to to avoid possession.

Plus, it did accomplish his goal. With the Darkness pulling back one of Bugzzy’s arms in order to heal it, it let Spike wriggle out of the other arm that was still around him from the failed tackle. Stepping back to put some distance between him and the possessed beetle, he took stock of the situation.

Kawasaki had stumbled when he hit Bugzzy over the head earlier, overbalancing from the weight of the frying pan and having only recently recovered. The chef charged across the room, aiming to strike from Bugzzy’s injured side, but the Darkness reacted too quickly. It had already healed the beetle’s arm in the moments it took for Spike to notice Kawasaki, and the appendage snapped out to grasp the chef’s arm before the strike could land.

Kawasaki’s eyes widened in fear as the Darkness squeezed, and the chef let out a shriek of pain as his arm broke with a sickening SNAP. He reflexively dropped the flying pan in the process, which clattered to the floor in front of Spike. He tracked that for a moment, noting that it had fallen with the handle facing him, before the dragon’s eyes darted back up to the two combatants.

Bugzzy’s mandibles clicked menacingly close to Kawasaki’s face, the chef having just barely managed to pull himself away from the strike. Doing so jostled his injured arm, though, forcing out another involuntary cry of pain and prompting Spike to finally do something again. Running on adrenaline and with ever increasing concern for what the Darkness would do to an incapacitated Kawasaki, the little dragon picked up the pan in front of him.

He very nearly toppled over from the weight.

What the heck is this made of, Spike thought, cast iron?

His eyes blew wide open from the sudden chain of realizations that that thought brought on.

The frying pan was made of iron.

Iron, like all metals, is a great electrical conductor.

Air is, generally, a terrible conductor.

The reason he couldn’t shoot lightning bolts like a comic book character was because of the ever-present resistor surrounding him. But since he was holding the frying pan…

Spike ran forward as fast as he could without falling over, bringing the frying pan over his shoulder like a baseball bat. His claws began to spark as he let out a battle cry, snapping the Darkness’s attention to him and prompting it to drop Kawasaki. That was a mistake on its part, and Spike couldn’t help but grin; now the chef was out of the danger zone.

Spike swung the frying pan with all his might, and though the Darkness moved Bugzzy’s arms to block the blow, it must not have realized that the dragon had activated his new electrical powers. Despite cast iron being nowhere near as good of a conductor as something like copper, it was still leagues better than air. So as soon as the cooking implement came into contact with the beetle’s forearm, Bugzzy still seized up. Electricity forced its way through the Darkness-possessed insect, bringing muscles to a standstill as it went. The Darkness was able to keep its host alive through the experience, but movement wasn’t an option.

Before even a second had passed, Spike dropped the frying pan and backed up, feeling more than a little drained from his stunt. Channeling that high of a voltage must have been the most magic that he’d ever used at once, even more than his messenger flames, but the battle wasn’t done just yet and he couldn’t afford to take a break.

Thankfully, before the Darkness could recover Bugzzy from the shock, Kawasaki pushed himself up and delivered a mighty left hook with his uninjured arm, sending Bugzzy to the floor and finally forcing the Darkness out of its host. Spike stared as the blob of Darkness floated there, its single eye seeming to see right through him and Kawasaki. Castle Dedede’s kitchens were still for maybe a moment until flames built in the back of Spike’s throat and the Darkness made a decision.

It tried to make a break for it, charging towards the opening where the door used to be, but it barely got more than a meter away before it was enveloped in emerald fire. True to Twilight’s prediction, he could feel the magic begin to take hold, transforming the Darkness bit by bit into magical smoke that would make its way to the destination Spike was focusing on: right in front of his sister.

Two seconds later, the Darkness was gone, and Spike was left in a room with an unconscious beetle and injured chef.

The Darkness had only just materialized before the Element of Magic removed it from existence.

Twilight herself barely even had to react. When the blob of Darkness formed in front of her, having been successfully carried by Spike’s messenger flame (and wasn’t that a relief that her hypothesis was correct), she reacted on instinct. With her already being on edge from the entire situation despite the minimal resistance that she had encountered so far, she fired off a bolt of magic before she could even think. Her Element took care of the rest.

A flash of purple light illuminated the dark hallway, and the Darkness dissolved into nothing just as quickly as it arrived.

For a moment, it broke Twilight’s concentration on her light spell. But a moment was all that the hall needed to be plunged into total darkness. This level of Castle Dedede was entirely underground and had no windows, so with the power cut, the corridor she was in was pitch-black. It didn’t help that she was still blinking purple spots out of her eyes from her Element’s earlier attack, either.

Softly swearing under her breath, Twilight got her light spell working again and once more were the walls awash with a faint purple light. The stonework in this hallway was practically identical to that of the rest of the castle, and had it not been for the mental map that she had built over the past month of living there, Twilight would have been horribly lost. Even still, the bottom layer of Castle Dedede was nearly labyrinthine, and she was mentally cursing the architects for the design as she checked over her shoulder to make sure nothing had snuck up on her while the light was out.

Twilight wasn’t quite sure what tipped her off to what happened next. Maybe it was the sound of fabric rustling softly in an otherwise silent hallway. Maybe it was a small amount of displaced air from someone moving quickly. Or maybe it was the Element of Magic pulsing slightly again from nearby Darkness.

Regardless of what prompted her, Twilight still whipped her head back around and cast a shield spell just in time to save her life. With a thunk, a kunai slammed against her shield almost exactly as she cast it, a mere few centimeters from her widened eyes. A moment later, it had clattered to the stone floor as Twilight dropped the shield and sent a retaliatory strike towards the Bio Spark that had thrown it, which was perched atop a pillar that held a darkened light bulb.

The ninja jumped immediately, dodging the fired magic and slinking back into the shadows. Twilight tried to track them, and had it just been her and the Bio Spark in the hallway, she likely would have caught them in her magic and purged them of the Darkness. Unfortunately, they were not alone, and the Element of Magic pulsing once again was enough to break her concentration and let the Bio Spark slip out of sight before she could get a decent telekinetic grip around them.

That pulse, alongside the fur along her back standing on end, was all the warning she got, but it was enough for her to leap to the side and out of the way before something landed on her. There was a loud thunk as whatever it was hit the ground just behind her, followed by the crackle of discharging electricity. Twilight whirled around as two other figures landed by the same spot, the purple light of her horn casting the three Pluggs in an eerie glow.

Well, at least that meant that she was close to the generator.

The closest of the three Pluggs—one that Twilight recognized as Lieutenant Licht—was the one that had initially jumped at her. Like all beings possessed by the Darkness, his eyes had gone completely black from pupil to sclera, and in her hornlight his blue-green body was far darker than it would be in more neutral lighting. Electricity arced between his prongs, prompting Twilight to quickly encase herself in a bubble shield for protection.

Most Pluggs, while dangerous, are only major threats up close, as the poor conductivity of air makes their naturally generated electricity useless at range. If a Plugg manages to make contact with a victim, though, their attacks can very easily incapacitate or even kill their adversary in mere moments, should they choose to ramp up their voltage enough. Such an attack, even one normally lethal for other creatures, wouldn’t kill Twilight on account of her alicorn physiology allowing her to survive even with a stopped heart, but it would take her out of the fight long enough for the Bio Spark to finish the job.

But that alone wouldn’t usually be enough for her to invest in a full bubble shield. Keeping one up (especially one both conductive enough to nullify the Pluggs’ attacks and strong enough to withstand the Bio Spark’s) was draining, even with the Element of Magic supplementing her power. The shields she had cast on the Halberd and in Dark Castle had had Sunset’s aid to fall back on, and the one she had cast during the battle with Nightmare had taken less mana at the cost of both concentration and time, two resources that she didn’t have much of at the moment. An all-purpose shield was the most draining to cast even with the minor optimization of it being spherical, so what convinced her to do so was the fact that Lieutenant Licht was a cut above most Pluggs.

When Twilight had first inquired to Bandee about the organizational structure of Dedede’s military not long after the incident with the Halberd, she’d been given quite a few anecdotes about various promotions in the process. One of them had been about how Licht had earned his current rank: he had developed a technique to get around the range limitation that Pluggs naturally had. By ionizing the air between his prongs and carefully directing current using the limited electrokinesis that Pluggs could use within their own bodies, Licht could fire globs of plasma at a target with an effective range of around ten meters.

Sunset had called it a miniature plasma railgun when she’d heard about it and promptly declared it “some of the coolest shit [she’d] ever heard.”

Licht was still teaching the technique to some of the other Pluggs, but it had taken him years to master himself so progress was slow-going. Unfortunately, given how the Darkness had interacted with Spike’s abilities and that it was seemingly telepathic, that probably wouldn’t be an issue for it.

All in all, that left Twilight in a rather tight spot. She couldn’t focus her attention on the three Pluggs in front of her, because purging the Darkness from all three at once would take enough of the Element of Magic’s power to force her to drop her shield, leaving her vulnerable to the Bio Spark in the rafters. Likewise, searching around to deal with the Bio Spark first would let the Pluggs bombard her shield with superheated air until something eventually got through. If Twilight had no other options, it would’ve been a true catch twenty-two.

Thankfully, Twilight had another option that she’d been working on as of late. It took a bit of time to set up before casting, though, so she had to hope that her shield held. Her eyes darted around as she prepared, keeping track of as many of her adversaries as she could in the dim hallway. There was another thunk behind her as the Bio Spark either threw another kunai or dropped down to attack directly, but her shield held and by the time Twilight could twist around to check they had already vanished back into the shadows. She looked back at the Pluggs just in time to see Licht charge forward—likely to try and overwhelm her shield electrically—before her vision was obscured by two hot globs of plasma.

There was a sizzling sound as they began to melt through the stone floor at the base of the shield, quickly overtaken by the crackle of electricity as Licht made contact with the front of her shield. Twilight winced at the increase of pressure on her horn, but she didn’t let it fall. No, she needed just one more piece of information to cast her prepared spell, she couldn’t fail now.

Gritting her teeth and focusing, Twilight kept her eyes peeled and looked around. She paid close attention to the rafters, given that it was the easiest place for the Bio Spark to blend in and strike from the shadows, and a glint of metal caught her eye. Glinting in the residual light from Licht’s electrical attack was a thrown kunai, and now Twilight knew exactly where the Bio Spark was.

She grinned. Gotcha.

Getting a solid telekinetic grip on another living being was extremely difficult, even for alicorns, and doing so on four resisting creatures at once would be nigh impossible. Even if Twilight could, though, the Darkness had shown that it knew how to break out of that sort of thing, and she doubted that the piece of Darkness that had possessed Spike hadn’t informed the rest of its species about that weakness of telekinesis. But Twilight knew that weakness as well, and she had spent the better part of the previous day developing a workaround.

With a wordless shout, her bubble shield expanded and inverted.

The prospect of using shields offensively was something that she’d talked to Shiny about extensively in her youth. While Twilight had never been interested in combat herself, she had been fascinated by the magic involved in shielding, and her older brother had been happy to teach her. The pair of them, though, had eventually come to the conclusion that offensive shields generally took too much power to be useful. Any tactics that necessitated a fully immobile enemy would take too long to execute, since the power draw of a fully enclosed external shield would give most unicorns mana drain before they could use it. They’d be better off using the environment to their advantage or using other spells to immobilize a target.

But for all Twilight had spoken with her brother about combat spells, she’d never brought it up to Princess Celestia. Her talks with her teacher had focused mostly on magical research, and the closest they’d gotten to combat was when Twilight had asked questions about politics. If she had talked to her about it, maybe she’d have reached her most recent breakthrough earlier, as while the power draw of an external shield would be too much for any unicorn, if an alicorn were to attempt it…

Twilight’s wings flared out to their full extent as her shield grew, almost behaving like a cell membrane as it warped around and enveloped the three Pluggs. The shield reached the rafters in mere fractions of a second, completely encasing the Bio Spark before they could ever hope to react to it and try to dodge. The spell was a modification of a telekinesis spell that Twilight had been working on mastering even before her Ascension, intended to catch everything within a radius of the caster (determined by the amount of power put into the spell in the first place). Adjusting it to work as a shield instead had taken a bit of thought and an original shield to work with, but she was quite happy to see that it had worked.

With her four opponents caught in her shields, Twilight could begin phase two of her plan. Getting this part of the spell right had taken the bulk of the work the day before, and she had no real way to test it until now, so she was hoping to the stars and back that she’d gotten it right. The Element of Magic glowed with power so brightly that Twilight had to squeeze her eyes shut, meaning that she missed the hallway light up like it was under the noonday sun. The four shields glowed just as intensely as the Element as it poured more and more magic into them to purge the Darkness within.

A few seconds later, the glow receded, and Twilight tentatively let her magic drop as she kept watch of the four Dreamlanders. She still had her light spell up, of course, and her Element had taken the brunt of the work on purging the Darkness, but she was still ready to react, just in case.

Thankfully, she didn’t need to. The three Pluggs were clearly disoriented by the experience and there was a thud as the Bio Spark fell out of the rafters, but their eyes were open and no longer showed signs of the Darkness’s possession. Smiling, she called out, “Lieutenant?”

Licht blinked a few times as he got his bearings back before quickly snapping to attention. “Princess Twilight! You’re alright!” He bowed as much as a Plugg was able to. “Thank you for saving me and my men from the Darkness.”

Twilight flushed a bit from the praise and being bowed at—she was still a bit unused to her new position and bowing to show reverence was rare enough in Dreamland that she hadn’t acclimated to it—but she stood tall regardless. “We need to get the generator back up and running and restore power to the castle,” she said. “Can you four handle protecting it while I purge the rest of the castle of the Darkness?”

The Bio Spark, who had just gotten back to their feet, drew and inspected their blade. Seemingly satisfied that no damage had come to it, they nodded at Twilight. “These forces of Darkness have bastardized the shadows that I call home,” they said as they moved to pick up the kunai that the Darkness had thrown. “I shall strike down any that try to drag me back into their clutches.”

One of the Pluggs—Twilight really wished she could remember their names, but she wasn’t Pinkie and there were simply too many residents of Castle Dedede for her to have met all of them—rolled their eyes. “Yeesh, dramatic much?” she asked. Turning back to Twilight, she nodded at her, her eyes resolute. “We’ve got this, Princess.”

With Licht and the other Plugg also having the same look in their eyes, Twilight let herself smile a bit. Maybe things weren’t completely hopeless, yet.

“Let’s get that generator back online.”

A determined pair of yellow eyes narrowed as Castle Dedede started to appear over the horizon. He thankfully hadn’t encountered any additional blobs of Darkness on his way, having kept just within the canopy of the various woodlands between his base on Orange Ocean and the castle to avoid detection from both land and sky. It was slow-going, and if he were alone he would have taken fully to the air, but getting into a fight right now would risk the precious cargo in his arms.

Sailor Dee groaned again from some combination of pain and delirium, but did not wake. Meta Knight cringed regardless, though, and pushed his wings ever harder as he kept an eye on the sky (while carefully avoiding looking directly at Zero). The rain of Darkness had ceased about a quarter hour ago, but that didn’t mean that a few weren’t still sticking around in the sky (he could see one now, even, hanging around in a patch of sky that meant he was practically guaranteed to encounter it on his way to Castle Dedede), nor did it give Meta Knight any sort of peace of mind. All it meant was that the initial phase of the invasion was over, and unless they successfully repelled Zero itself, Popstar would be doomed to a slow and agonizing death as the Darkness laid siege to the entire planet.

Author's Note

Bugzzy, the Darkened Insect King
Bugzzy is already a formidable foe on his own, but with the Darkness backing him up? It'll take some clever thinking to take down this self-proclaimed King of Insects, as few can hope to match him in pure strength!

Licht, the Darkened Lieutenant of Castle Dedede
Lieutenant Licht is already a clever Plugg, and the Darkness's access to his memories will be an issue. To make matters worse, he never works alone. Good luck, Magic.

Hey all, ANWAS here. It's uh...been a while, huh? That few-day-long break I took back in July kinda turned into a few-week-long break and before I knew it three months had gone by in a haze of job hunting (an absolutely dreadful process, let me tell ya) with no work having gone into this fic. Then a routine oil change on my car turned into replacing the brakes when they fell off when the mechanics checked on them since apparently braking in the garage was finicky (horrifying that I'd been driving with brakes that broken, but hey they're fixed now!) which cost around $1000. And then a few weeks later I brought the car in again because a wheel bearing was starting to come loose and it turned out that the half shaft was busted too, which ran me another $1000 (but hey, now my car is quiet enough that you can hold a conversation above 40 mph; you couldn't before because it was too loud). Then my student loans started coming due. So all in all I've been stressed enough that I just haven't been in the right mindset to write.

But, I'm finally employed, so I've had the time to destress and get back to work on my hobbies! The next few chapters are actually already written, I just need to edit and proofread them, so the rest of this arc shouldn't take another half of a year to complete, barring unforseen circumstances like my laptop finally kicking the bucket. Hopefully that doesn't happen. Fingers crossed and knock on wood and all that.

With that said, on to a bit of analysis on the chapter itself. A bit of a shorter one this time (I say on a nearly 5500-word chapter, but this is comparative to last time's 13.5k behemoth), but I felt it necessary to split the Battle for Castle Dedede into two chapters. Originally it was one chapter and I had some other things planned, but part of the benefit of writing most of the rest of this arc is that I could move some things around so that they flowed better before fully comitting. I'll probably do the same for future arcs as well; write out the whole thing before I start posting chapters, so that I'm not locked into a format that I get second thoughts on later.

In any case, see y'all next time!

Chapter XXXVI: Three

Shining Armor was completely and utterly speechless. Between Spike electrocuting a giant beetle with a frying pan and Twily managing to get offensive shielding to work, he was stuck performing an imitation of a fish as he continually tried and failed to articulate his thoughts. He’d already known about the former, at least, as he had been around to watch the debrief after they had restored the Rainbow Bridges, but the latter shouldn’t even have been possible. The best he could do to warp his talents into an offensive form was either by rapidly expanding a shield to turn it into a blunt object, or by making planar shields a couple of angstroms thick. That was impressive, sure, but far too inefficient to use in combat when simply carrying a sword would accomplish the same goal (though being able to slice through material that conventional cutting spells failed on was a neat party trick).

The fact that Twily had managed to hold four external shields long enough to purge the Darkness from her adversaries, even with the Element of Magic, was absurd. Frankly, he wasn’t quite sure if he should be feeling immense amounts of pride in his sister for the accomplishment or if he should be a bit put out that she was quite likely to swipe his title of being the best Equestrian shield mage in centuries (disregarding Princess Celestia, of course). Hay, with the sheer amount of power she was putting out, with just a bit more finesse Twilight could probably even give the Princess a run for her money in that regard.

He almost, almost felt bad for whatever big threat would come for Equestria first after she got back.

If she gets back, some traitorous part of Shining’s mind whispered.

He shook the thought away. Shining knew his sister, and he knew that she would stop at nothing to find a way home. Even if she had to fight Void Itself.

Before that train of thought could continue, though, Rainbow Dash letting out a cheer brought his attention back to the screen. Twily had gotten the generator back up and running with the help of those creatures that she’d saved from the Darkness and teleported back to the kitchen after making sure that the four of them would protect it.

Rarity let out a relieved sigh as soon as the power was back on, and was the first to speak in minutes. “Well, they certainly have more time now.”

“They’ve still gotta take the castle back,” Applejack pointed out. “That won’t be easy.”

“It won’t be,” Shining agreed. “But it’s possible, and if I know my sister, a possibility is all she needs.”

When Twilight teleported back to the kitchen, she wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Spike had sent along that blob of Darkness, so she knew that he was alright, at least, but what had they fought in the process? Was Chef Kawasaki okay? Did they still have their food stores?

What she was greeted with was an unconscious Bugzzy, Kawasaki chowing down on a piece of asparagus, and a very smug Spike. Oh, and a wide open and broken door, which she fixed and relocked almost on instinct as soon as she noticed it.

Both Spike and Kawasaki jumped when she teleported in and braced themselves to attack (and when had Spike picked up Kawasaki’s frying pan?), but quickly relaxed when they saw that it was just her. Twilight shot both of them a tired smile and glanced at the (once again lit) lights, taking note of the humming of the walk-in freezer in the back of the room as well. At the very least, her quest to get the generator running again had bought them time.

Looking back at the sprawled-out form of Bugzzy on the floor, Twilight finally broke the silence that had pervaded the room since she’d popped in. “So I take it he was possessed?”

Spike gave her a deadpan look. “No, we beat him up just because.”

Twilight snorted and rolled her eyes, allowing the snark without comment (and she couldn’t really blame him for being snarky; she knew that she could get just as snippy in stressful situations). As she did, she cast a quick diagnostic spell on Bugzzy to make sure that it was safe to wake him magically—as much as it would be better for him to recover naturally, they had access to the entire kitchen and a severe shortage of people who could help take back the castle. And they would take back Castle Dedede.

She just…wasn’t quite sure how, yet.

“So,” Kawasaki cut in as Twilight got to work on waking Bugzzy up, “the lights are on. Is the generator guarded?”

Twilight nodded. “I managed to purge the Darkness from Lieutenant Licht and a few others on my way down there. They’re keeping an eye on the generator, and that’ll at least buy us some more time.”

Kawasaki frowned. “Time to do what, exactly?”

Twilight cringed. As much as she was loath to admit it aloud, she said, “I don’t know. There’s just too many unknowns. We don’t know how fast the Darkness can split itself, we don’t know if they have reinforcements, we don’t know how things went for the Meta-Knights, we don’t know where Kirby is-”

Before she could work herself into a proper panic, though, Spike gently shook her shoulder to snap her out of it. “What if that didn’t matter?” he asked, the glint in his eyes making it clear that he’d had an idea. With her spiral halted for the moment, she turned her full attention to him.

Spike’s ideas usually had a fifty-fifty shot of backfiring spectacularly, but the situation was desperate enough that Twilight was at least willing to hear out any thoughts before rejecting them. “How do you mean?”

“Well, with Zero in the sky, the Darkness is probably going to be able to spread really fast since things feel so hopeless,” Spike elaborated, “so going through the castle and taking them out one by one’ll be too slow.”

Twilight nodded. He was right on that account, assuming that his thoughts on how the Darkness reproduced were correct (and given his own experiences, she thought that he had a pretty good idea of how it could split itself). It was simply far too inefficient to purge Castle Dedede of the Darkness by going through it and purging it from every inhabitant; it would both take too long and there was a strong possibility of them missing one. But she still wasn’t quite sure where her brother was going with this.

“So what if you cast a spell that hit the entire castle at once like…” Spike trailed off, trying to think of an example. Snapping his claws in realization, he continued. “Like what Shining did at his wedding to clear the Changelings out of Canterlot!”

As he exclaimed his idea, he mimed an expanding shield with his claws, forcing Twilight to lean back to avoid an accidental hit from the frying pan—clearly Spike had forgotten that he was holding it. The dragon blinked when he realized it before shooting her a sheepish green and quickly placing his hands behind his back. “Uh, sorry. But yeah, I saw you working on shields yesterday, so I just thought that might…work…y’know?”

Twilight frowned in thought. “It could work,” she conceded. It wasn’t a terrible idea; enveloping the castle in a shield and then purging the Darkness from it was essentially what she had done against Licht and the others, just on a larger scale. That scale was the issue, though. “But only if I can manage it. Shiny had days to get that shield up, he could only keep it up with constant attention, and the shield at the ceremony probably only happened like that because of Cadance lending a hoof.”

Spike pointed at her wings, followed a moment later by pointing at her tiara. “I think you’re forgetting something.”

Reflexively, Twilight tapped the Element of Magic with a hoof and brought her right wing around to look at it. “I…might be able to pull it off,” she allowed. “Maybe. But even with the Element of Magic and the extra power from being an alicorn, I don’t have Shining’s proficiency with shields. It’ll still take a bit and I’d have to be in the center of the castle.”

“That’d be the throne room,” Kawasaki added with a frown. “How long would it take you to charge up that spell?”

“An hour at least, maybe two,” Twilight replied. “Complex shields like this can be finicky; they’re not something you can just cast instantly like a simple bubble shield. It’ll take some preparatory spells and basically all of my concentration when I cast it, so I’ll need someone to keep the Darkness off me in the throne room when I do.”

“We could split its attention,” came a voice from the floor, and everyone looked down in surprise as Bugzzy began pushing himself to his feet.

“You’re awake already?” Twilight asked incredulously. “I thought you’d be out for another few minutes at least.”

“Can’t-” Bugzzy hissed and brought a gloved hand up to massage his temple as his mandibles chittered. “Can’t keep the King of the Insects down for long.” He gave Spike an appraising look and involuntarily twitched. “Good job on the lightning, kid, but didja have to hold it that long?”

Spike gave off the impression that if he had eyebrows, he’d be raising one of them. “Did you prefer being possessed?”

Bugzzy chuckled and grimaced simultaneously, an impressive feat for a beetle. “No, I suppose not.” Looking over to the chef in the room, he started stumbling his way towards the counter—Twilight presumed it was for him to lean on. “Hey, Kawasaki, you got any syrup?”

Kawasaki blinked in surprise before jolting upright and shoving the last of his asparagus in his mouth. “Ah, yeah, I think I have some,” he said, quickly making his way over to the fridge and rummaging around for a bit before he retrieved a bottle of maple syrup. Closing the fridge, he grabbed a glass and walked over to Bugzzy with both in hand.

Spike and Twilight both looked on in some combination of shock and mild disgust. The latter simply wrinkled her nose a bit, but Spike, in a characteristic lack of tact, voiced his confusion. “You just drink…straight maple syrup?”

Bugzzy poured his syrup and even Twilight couldn’t hold back a choking sound when he slammed it back like a shot. When he turned back to look at them, it couldn’t be seen on account of his mandibles, but Twilight could tell from his eyes that he would be grinning if he could. “Normally I prefer sap straight from the tree,” he said. “Syrup's a bit too sugary. But I can make do for now.”

Twilight, though admittedly a bit intrigued by Bugzzy’s diet, pushed her mind back on track. “You said that we should split its attention?”

“Well, you said that you need someone to keep the Darkness away from you,” he elaborated, “so I figure that it’ll be easier on them if we split up and force it three ways.”

“Four—wait, no, five,” Twilight corrected with a bit of a frown. “There’ll be some going after the generator as well, and I’d expect some to come here, too. I don’t think we have enough people to spli-”

She was cut off by the boarded-up window exploding inward.

Everyone reacted instantly. Spike jumped back and held the frying pan out like a sword with a crackle of charge, Bugzzy smashed his glass against the counter and held the sharp debris like a weapon, Kawasaki grabbed and threw the nearest salt shaker, and Twilight fired off a beam of magic before she could even blink.

The figure that had smashed through the window blurred as it dodged out of the way of the salt shaker, but instead of clearing Twilight’s attack entirely it landed just to the right of it. Then the figure—which Twilight had initially clocked as a sphere of Darkness in the chaos of the broken window—held out a gleaming sword with a second sphere impaled on its tip directly in the path of the magical laser. In mere moments, Galaxia was visible in its entirety as the Darkness on it was incinerated.

Slowly—likely to not provoke any more attacks—Meta Knight turned around and lowered his sword. “Good instincts,” he commented.

“Well, I’m not quite sure what reaction you expec-” Twilight began, but once again cut herself off upon seeing what Meta Knight had in his arms.

She wasn’t the only one shocked. Spike’s frying pan clattered to the ground, Kawasaki retched into the nearby trash can, and she could’ve sworn that she heard a muttered “By the stars” from Bugzzy.

Honestly? Fair.

Given how quickly Meta must have flown to get to Castle Dedede (and the fact that apparently he encountered some Darkness on the way), it was a miracle that Sailor’s cap was still on her head. But that was the only comforting thing about the scene in front of Twilight, as saying that Sailor Dee was in a rough state would be the understatement of the millennium. She was extremely pale, her permanent blush having disappeared entirely and her orange skin having paled to almost match the tan of her face. But more concerningly was her feet—or rather foot, as the right one was less a foot and more a mess of burnt flesh that ended in a stump where her foot should’ve connected with her torso. Whatever happened hadn’t burned the underside of her torso, thankfully, but full treatment would probably involve amputating whatever was left of her right foot.

The only comfort was the fact that she was shifting ever so slightly in her sleep and that her shallow breaths were—while just barely—audible. She was alive, at the least.

“Celestia’s starry tail, what the hay happened?” Twilight asked, but internally she was already fearing the answer. Meta Knight had come alone, after all, and with the nature of the damage…

“The Darkness got to Miss Shimmer,” Meta solemnly confirmed. Looking around at the kitchen, his eyes narrowed. “Are your food stores sufficient?”

Twilight swore under her breath. Sunset’s magic was one of the main counters they had against the Darkness, so her being off the table was just about as close to a worst-case scenario as they could get. Regardless, they had more pressing concerns at the moment. “Kawasaki,” she said, snapping the chef’s attention to her, “see if you can salvage any of the tomato paste from earlier.”

In the meantime, Twilight got to work on repairing the window. While the glass was unsalvageable, Meta Knight’s entrance thankfully hadn’t shattered the boards beyond repair, so all it would take to fix that up was a few adhesive spells. Hopefully, the lingering spellwork would serve a dual purpose and help ward away any pieces of the Darkness looking to get in that way, too.

Meanwhile, Kawasaki had gathered up some of the leftover paste from when the Darkness had had him smashing maxim tomatoes left and right. The paste wouldn’t be as effective as a fresh tomato would be, especially after having been left out in the open for almost an hour, but it was far simpler for them to administer it to Sailor in a paste form and wouldn’t use up their more limited supply of full tomatoes.

Twilight finished boarding up the window again just in time to look back and see Meta Knight trying to find something resembling a comfortable position to lay Sailor Dee in. Quickly, she cast a duplication charm on a couple of the boards (plus an adhesion charm and a cushioning charm) to at least get something comfortable for her—the kitchen floor was cold and unforgiving in comparison. While she was at it, she conjured up some gauze to make sure that the wound didn’t get infected. The duplicates and conjuration wouldn’t last forever, of course, and would dematerialize back into free-flowing mana in a scant few hours. But for the time being, she could at least provide some sort of comfort for Sailor.

Meta nodded at her in appreciation as he laid Sailor on the provided cushioned boards just in time for Kawasaki to approach with the tomato paste. Waddle Dees didn’t have mouths, exactly, and instead absorbed food, water, and air directly through the skin on the lower part of their face. This even worked while they were unconscious, but according to Bandee it got a bit finicky with solids if the Waddle Dee wasn’t awake to subconsciously use their magic while eating.

Thankfully, the paste was absorbed just fine and worked its magic rather quickly. Even as Kawasaki was backing off, Twilight could see some color return to Sailor and she seemed to start breathing more deeply. Her constant unconscious shifting relaxed a bit as well, though she didn’t wake even as Twilight carefully wrapped the gauze around the wound.

With Sailor no longer actively in critical condition, though, the tension in the room that had been building since Meta Knight’s explosive entrance reduced a bit. Bugzzy even let out a chuckle, though it sounded somewhat mirthless to Twilight’s ears. “So,” he said, “at least we have more people for the plan, now.”

Meta Knight’s yellow eyes zeroed in on him in an instant, and Twilight could see that the beetle wasn’t expecting such sudden attention if the way he flinched back was any indication. “What plan?”

The plan, in essence, ended up being rather simple. With a bit of practice while Twilight was setting up her shield spell, Spike determined that he could send things to Meta Knight with his messenger flame—in his own words, he’d spent enough time around him (or perhaps around Galaxia, Twilight mused) that he’d gotten a decent feel for how his magic felt. While she wasn’t happy about it (to the point that she and Spike had argued about it for a solid fifteen minutes before she relented), he ended up volunteering himself to be the one to accompany Twilight and hold off the Darkness that would inevitably try and prevent her from reaching the throne room, as he was the only one other than Meta Knight who could outright remove the Darkness from the situation as long as Twilight was focused on her shield.

Meta himself would be staying in the kitchen to kill any Darkness that Spike sent to him, or those that would simply target the area. He’d actually offered to accompany Twilight at first, but between Spike standing firm on his position and Twilight being able to cast some spells while charging the shield to help him, he’d decided to stay and keep their Darkness-killing abilities in two locations instead of one. And besides it being a decent strategy on its own, he refused to leave one of his men alone in such a vulnerable position so deep in hostile territory, and with the kitchen being such a valuable target for the Darkness, Kawasaki or Bugzzy wouldn’t be suitable to hold the line there.

Those two would be making as much of a ruckus as they could to draw as many of the Darkness’s forces as possible to them. Kawasaki, equipped with his trusty frying pan (or, to be more accurate, a spare, as Spike was holding onto one of them) and a rolling pin, and Bugzzy, equipped with naught but his fists and a thirst for vengeance against the Darkness, would make their ways to the West and East Wings of Castle Dedede, respectively. The pair were well aware that they’d likely be overwhelmed eventually and once again taken by the Darkness, but they were willing to go through with it if it meant that they could retake the castle.

It was, frankly, a disturbing amount of trust that they were placing in Twilight. She was far, far from comfortable gambling basically everything on this, but it was just about the only viable option with the deadlines they were working with. According to Meta Knight, anything else, like going through the castle to track down and eliminate the Darkness one by one left far too much room for error and would take far too long—by the time they successfully rescued Castle Dedede from the Darkness’s influence, the rest of the planet would be lost.

No, this was the only way forward, so Twilight pushed down her qualms about taking massive risks and tried to perform her own role to the best of her abilities. Her job was all magic, and she was good at magic. Hay, she held the Element of Magic. She could do this. She had to do this. She could not afford to fail. Not now. Not when so much was on the line. So she cast her preparatory spells and worked on getting a specialized reversible shield working and ignored the ever-growing apprehension within her.

One hour, thirty-six minutes, and twenty-seven seconds after the plan was finalized, Twilight gave the signal for the four of them to move out.

It was a good plan.

But no plan survives contact with the enemy.

Castle Dedede’s West Wing was perhaps the area of the castle that Chef Kawasaki knew best. It contained the residential suites (which wrapped around a courtyard to intersect the main hallway at two points), kitchens, and banquet halls, meaning that he rarely even left the area. He could probably navigate the wing blindfolded if the hallways were empty.

And while he wasn’t blindfolded, the hallways were empty. It was disconcerting, to say the least. Castle Dedede was normally so vibrant and full of life, so seeing the halls completely deserted put Kawasaki majorly on edge. The Darkness knew that there was an active resistance, so why didn’t it have troops patrolling the halls? Had it guessed at their plan?

Kawasaki shook his head. That didn’t matter; he had to lure the Darkness to him regardless. Thankfully, he had a plan for that. One that involved the room he had just entered—his own.

He wasn’t sure how much the Darkness that was in his head had transmitted to its fellows, but if he was lucky then it hadn’t betrayed the fact that he kept a decent amount of leftovers in a minifridge in his room (working with food so much had him peckish sometimes, sue him). Most of it wouldn’t keep with the power off and thus probably wouldn’t be high priority for the Darkness anyway, but there was a single item in the fridge that Kawasaki was sure would draw attention to him.

Opening the minifridge, he reached in and pulled out a maxim tomato.

Kawasaki took in a shuddering breath as he closed the fridge and stared at the tomato in his hand. What he was about to do was quite possibly the stupidest, most reckless thing he’d ever done in his life. But Princess Twilight needed the heat off of her so she could concentrate and Spike was so young to defend her alone and Meta had to defend Sailor and Bugzzy was better suited for the East Wing. He was the only one who could do this.

Kawasaki steeled his expression and turned around. Marching out of his room as loudly as he could, he held the maxim tomato aloft for the world to see. “Alright you castle-stealing, friend-stealing blobs,” he shouted into the hallway, banking on something being around to hear him, “I’ve got a tomato!”

A scuttling sound above him drew Kawasaki’s attention, and he gulped at the sight. A horde of Comos—at least five of them, perhaps more that he couldn’t see—were approaching along the hallway’s ceiling. He only hesitated for a moment, though, before carefully stuffing the tomato in his apron pocket and holding his rolling pin and frying pan in a fighting stance, one in each hand.

Taking another deep breath to calm himself, Chef Kawasaki narrowed his eyes at the Darkness-possessed residents of Castle Dedede. “Come and get it.”

The lead Como let out a screech—a sound that Kawasaki knew for a fact that Comos were incapable of making—and leapt from the ceiling directly towards Kawasaki’s head. With all three of its eyes being obsidian from pupil to sclera and with saliva dripping from its mandibles, it was a truly harrowing sight. Still, he stood his ground, raising up his frying pan to whack the Como out of the way just before it could latch onto his face, knocking it out in the process.

Before he could do anything else, though, one of the Comos that was still on the ceiling spat a wad of webbing at his arm, cocooning his left hand and the frying pan’s handle together. Effectively, it prevented him from changing his grip on the object at all. That would be annoying, but at least it’d be manageable.

Hearing something behind him, Kawasaki whirled around to bonk whatever it was with his rolling pin. The pin, though, sailed straight through open air and he realized that his assailant was a Waddle Dee holding a parasol. He hurriedly tried to correct his mistake, following through with a swipe from his webbed hand, but the Parasol Dee was quicker. They swiped Kawasaki’s legs out from under him, sending the chef sprawling face-first onto the ground.

For once, Kawasaki was glad that he didn’t have a proper nose, as despite it meaning that his sense of smell was generally worse than some others, he definitely would’ve broken it in that fall if he had one. Instead, it was just marginally painful and he could react quickly, pushing himself up with his right hand and swatting at the Parasol Dee with the pan in his left. Doing so was the correct decision in two separate ways: first, it slammed into the Parasol Dee, knocking them to the side and into the wall, and second, it avoided another web shot from a Como on the ceiling.

That would’ve stuck Kawasaki to the ground, effectively immobilizing him, but that reality was thankfully not to be. Unfortunately, a second web shot did hit his rolling pin, sticking that to the ground and forcing the chef to abandon that weapon. As he got back to his feet, he reassessed the situation. Another two Parasol Dees were approaching from down the hallway, and quickly looking over his shoulder, Kawasaki saw that Mr. Tick-Tock was boxing him in on the other side. When he glanced upward, he could see the three Comos doing something—wait, three?

Kawasaki grunted as an additional weight landed on his back and cried out in pain as the fourth Como bit him as hard as it could. With how short his arms were and the difficulty in reaching back there with the frying pan, he had very few options to deal with it. Stumbling backwards, he tried to slam himself into the wall to at least dislodge the spider, but the Como scurried up onto his head (displacing his toque) before he could manage it. All he managed to do was slam his back into the wall, giving the Comos on the ceiling a clear shot at his frying pan while he was stunned.

Thwip, thwip, thwip.

Triplet balls of sticky webbing hit the frying pan’s edges, securing it—and thus Kawasaki—to the wall. The chef tried his damndest to thrash out of it, but no matter what, the bindings held. All he could do was stare in horror as the Darkness-possessed denizens of Castle Dedede advanced towards him, even the ones he had managed to take out earlier with solid hits; the Darkness possessing them must’ve taken the time to fix those hits.

Then, to make matters worse, the lights in the hallway flickered. It was eye-catching enough to draw Kawasaki’s attention to it just in time for him to see the lights shut off fully once again.

And all Kawasaki knew was Darkness.

In Castle Dedede’s East Wing, Bugzzy was very much not having a good time. Despite having downed an additional few shots of syrup—which should, by all means, have left him in near perfect health—he was still sore from his confrontation with Spike and Kawasaki. The combination of the possession and a couple solid blows to the head had his memory of the fight a bit spotty, so all he could really remember was the tail end of the fight, when the kid had hit him with that electrified frying pan. Unfortunately, he knew from experience (specifically from training with Licht) that that meant that most of the healing effects of the syrup he’d drank would have gone into healing his burns, rather than all of the microscopic tears his seizing had caused. As a result, he was still sore all over his body, and nothing short of overeating, a maxim tomato, or good old fashioned waiting would fix that.

It had taken him a good few trips to the infirmary for one of the Nurse Waddle Dees to finally get it into his head why that happened, but he’d retained the information eventually!

Regardless, all of this put together meant that he wasn’t exactly at the top of his game, so he might have not noticed a Spear Waddle Dee until they were basically right on top of him. He’d had enough situational awareness to dodge their strike, thankfully, but he wasn’t able to get fully out of the way fast enough and the spear nicked his right forearm. Given that it had previously been aimed right for his chest, though, Bugzzy figured that he’d gotten lucky.

Additionally, the hit to his arm was a glancing blow, so his exoskeleton was able to prevent the spear from piercing through. Fighting through his soreness, Bugzzy retaliated quickly, as he knew that he needed to act before the Darkness recovered its wits. Launching out his left hand as he whirled around to face his adversary, he grabbed the spear around its middle and ripped it out of the Waddle Dee’s hands. Before the Darkness could even dream of doing anything about that, Bugzzy slammed the spear’s shaft into the Dee’s side like a staff, making sure to keep the pointed end away from both himself and the Dee.

The Waddle Dee’s spear was a bit short for an insect of Bugzzy’s stature, but the sheer strength behind the hit made up for the lackluster leverage. The unfortunate Waddle Dee flew into the air like a particularly large golf ball, sailing a solid ten meters before they tumbled painfully to the ground. Bugzzy winced—he hadn’t meant to hit them that hard—but he didn’t have time to ponder the morality of fighting his possessed comrades before the sound of rustling fabric drew his attention to something behind him.

Bugzzy spun back around, holding the spear horizontally to block whatever this new arrival was doing. That turned out to be a fortuitous decision, since it meant that the spear’s shaft took the first two mirror projectiles from a Simirror’s attack. That was all it could handle before shattering, but it bought Bugzzy enough time to let him slip to the left, dodging the rest of the projectile stream.

He tossed the broken shaft to the side and readjusted his grip on the pointed end in his left hand so that he was essentially wielding a short, pointy stick. Bugzzy whipped around his right hand to retaliate, hoping for his brute strength to simply knock out the Simirror in a single hit, but they reacted far more quickly than Bugzzy would’ve liked. The air shimmered for a moment like it was a hot summer’s day before solidifying into an iridescent shield in front of the Simirror. Bugzzy’s fist hit the shield dead center, and from there the Simorror’s reflection magic took over. His punch bounced away from the shield as the entire force of his punch was reflected right back onto him. Against most opponents, this is enough to effectively end the fight immediately, as the attacker would be left both hurting and overbalanced—easy pickings for the Simirror on the followup.

But Bugzzy wasn't like most opponents.

He had trained with Castle Dedede’s Simirrors before (he liked to cover his bases when it came to knowing how to win a fight), so he knew where both his and their weaknesses lay. Namely, he had learned how to take his own punches, and while a Simirror’s reflection was powerful, especially when reflecting an attack from someone like Bugzzy, it had one key weakness: the shield, much like an actual mirror, could only stand up to one solid hit before shattering. While this wouldn’t actually stun the Simorror, it would prevent them from simply recasting the spell; reflection effectively had a bit of a cooldown. It wasn’t much of an opening—a mere few seconds—but that was all Bugzzy needed.

When the reflection shield shattered, the Simirror—and thus the Darkness possessing them—would likely have expected Bugzzy to stumble as his punch was forced to the side, leaving him open to attack. Instead, they had failed to account for the extra limbs that he had courtesy of being a beetle: his wings. His elytra snapped open and buzzing filled the hallway as he used his wings to stabilize himself, leaving him ready to attack the Simirror the moment their shield went down.

The Darkness clearly hadn’t expected that, as its guard was completely down as Bugzzy lunged forward, stabbing the spearhead into the Simirror’s left hand and forcing them to drop their staff. The beetle wasn’t done yet, though, and as he caught the dropped mirror rod in his right hand, he wrapped his mandibles around the Simirror. Since he had left the broken spear embedded in the Simirror’s hand (with a mental apology to the unfortunate Simirror that the Darkness was possessing), the Darkness was too preoccupied with fixing the damage done to its host to prevent Bugzzy from suplexing them straight into the floor.

He whipped around and hurled the mirror rod at the Waddle Dee—who had gotten back up but was clearly still possessed if their eyes were any indication—from earlier as well. It wouldn’t keep either of them down for long, he knew, but it would let him get away long enough that he could make it to his destination.

There were very few things that Bugzzy could do to bait the Darkness to him, especially when the kitchens, generator, and Princess Twilight herself were much higher-priority targets. Even Kawasaki, Bugzzy presumed, had some stash of food that he could use to lure some of the Darkness to him. He, himself, didn’t have anything like that. But what he did have was intimate knowledge of almost every weapon in Castle Dedede’s armory from having sparred against almost everyone in the castle. And the East Wing included most of the administrative parts of Castle Dedede: offices, the treasury, and importantly for Bugzzy, the barracks and armory.

It might be unconventional for both of those to be in the castle itself, but hey, there wasn’t much space to build on a mountaintop.

Every piece of Darkness Twilight or Meta Knight took down was another member for their ragtag resistance group, so even if Twilight failed to stop the Darkness here, Bugzzy getting back to the kitchen with a ton of weapons was a decent enough fallback option. Because of that, he knew that the Darkness would be sending significant troops to stop him, and that this was effectively a suicide mission for the purposes of staying unpossessed—the Darkness would catch him and possess him once again. But if it kept them off of Princess Twilight’s back, it’d be worth it. And as Bugzzy saw the door to the armory, he would’ve grinned if he could.

Still, he had to play this strategically. Every second he bought here was another second that Twilight and Spike had fewer Darkness blobs to deal with, so he couldn’t just charge in without a care for his own health. He was almost certain that the Darkness had worked out where he was going, after all, so there had to be some Darkness-possessed creatures right behind the door, likely laying in wait to ambush him. Well, he could work with that.

Thankfully, from the hallway side, the armory had a pull door. Bugzzy could avoid the first strike of an ambush by simply staying behind the door itself. Since the door handle was on the left side, he had gripped it with his right hand to ready his other for a nasty left hook. When the first Blade Knight stormed out of the now-opened armory, sword at the ready and having backed out to actually face Bugzzy, they hadn’t expected to get socked hard enough to dent their armor. That forced them back a bit and aborted their sword swing, which let Bugzzy let go of the door handle and grip the Blade Knight’s sword arm hard enough that it let out a sick snap.

They didn’t drop the blade, though, the Darkness’s modifications letting its grip remain strong even with the broken forearm. But it still bought Bugzzy time, and when the second Blade Knight charged out of the armory with their sword raised, the beetle, still holding onto the first Knight’s broken arm, jerked their arm up and forward to intercept.

Even under the best of circumstances, a swordsman didn’t have any sort of chance to parry, or even simply block, a blow with a broken sword arm. The modifications that the Darkness had made to this Blade Knight—like the clearly increased grip strength—certainly helped enough to give the other Blade Knight pause, but it wasn’t enough to keep their blade in their hands. And the second Blade Knight hesitating for just a moment was all Bugzzy needed to let go of the first’s arm, grab them in his mandibles, and catch the falling sword’s hilt.

Raising up his new weapon, he blocked another swing from the second Blade Knight. Bugzzy was by no means a master swordsman—his fists and mandibles were his weapons of choice—but he had sparred with the various sword-wielding residents of Castle Dedede enough to know the basics. But against the Darkness it seemed like that wouldn’t be enough; this Blade Knight was certainly going to be better with a sword than him. Bugzzy would have to get creative if he wanted to win this.

So, with one Blade Knight still in his mandibles, he slammed said mandibles into the other Blade Knight. This knocked their helmets together with an ear-shattering CLANG, forcing the second Knight to stumble back and letting Bugzzy get close in again with another left hook. To free up his mandibles, he spun around and threw the first Blade Knight away from the door, where they slammed into the wall hard enough to chip the stonework. In the same motion, he slammed the flat of his blade against the other Blade Knight’s helmet, further disorienting the Darkness. Finally, reaching forward, Bugzzy squeezed the Blade Knight’s sword hand, breaking it similarly to how he broke the other Blade Knight’s arm. This time, though, with him aiming for the hand, it forced the Darkness to drop the sword.

Disarmed and disoriented, the Blade Knight could do nothing to stop Bugzzy from picking them up in his mandibles and slamming them into the ground. Hopefully, that’d be enough to keep the Darkness at bay for another few minutes.

With that taken care of, though, Bugzzy could finally properly enter the armory—and immediately jump to the side to avoid a bomb from a Poppy Bros. Junior. Bugzzy’s luck had finally run out, though, because that dodge landed him directly in front of a Burning Leo, leaving him staring into their coal-black eyes. The Burning Leo’s usual mane of flames had changed as well, the usually vibrant reds and oranges having distorted into an impossible flame as black as the blackest night.

Bugzzy scrambled to his feet as quickly as he could, but the jet of black flames that the possessed Burning Leo unleashed still clipped his leg. And by the stars did it hurt, like every nerve ending under the burned section of exoskeleton was being seared by a hot iron simultaneously. He could feel his cuticle in the burned area bubble and warp under the heat, and he wrenched his leg away from the flame as fast as possible, sparing a glance downward to inspect the damage.

It had felt a lot worse than it looked. While there would certainly be scarring, it didn’t look like there was any permanent damage that a maxim tomato wouldn’t fix. Still, he definitely wouldn’t be able to stand on it for the time being, so Bugzzy’s wings buzzed as he took to the air. That Burning Leo was more than just a threat, they were a priority.

As he flew out of the way of another bomb from the Poppy Bros.—which slammed against the wall of weapons with a kaboom and sent a mace clattering to the floor—he got an idea. He only had one shot at this, though, so he had to make sure to make it count.

When he dodged the next bomb—this one took out a longsword, two bows, and a quiver—he made a beeline for the Burning Leo, who was gearing up for another shot of fire breath. This time Bugzzy was ready for it, and when the black fire approached him he spun out of the way, the dark flames eerily glinting off of his stolen sword. He gripped the hilt with both hands as he approached the possessed Burning Leo and, with all of his strength, he slammed the flat of the blade into their side.

Upon contact, the sword deformed so much that it’d be useless as a weapon in the future, the heat having weakened the metal so much that it almost melted right out of Bugzzy’s hands. But it was solid enough when it hit the Burning Leo to launch them right at the Poppy Bros.—at just the same time as they were pulling out another bomb. The impact and the fire set off the explosive immediately, launching both the Burning Leo and the Poppy Bros. at the wall opposite the weapons, which was lined with lockers. There was a screech of bending metal as the two impacted, denting the lockers so much that they stuck there.

For a moment, Bugzzy thought that he might be home free to grab as many weapons as he could and get back to the kitchen. But a loud roar from just outside of the armory nixed that thought, for the half-open door simply exploded off of its hinges as a Fire Lion barged through. Its eyes and mane, much like the Burning Leo’s, were completely black. Its tail, rather than simply having a flame as for a tuft at its end, instead seemed to be composed almost entirely of that same horrible dark fire. Still, despite the terrifying sight, Bugzzy still ignored the throbbing pain in his leg and swooped down to pick up the mace that had fallen earlier.

He was going down, but by the stars he’d go down swinging.

Rei the Bio Spark shuddered as they observed the three beings making their way to the generator. Two were simple blobs of Darkness, which would be enough of an issue on their own, but accompanying them was King Doo—the only one of his kind in the castle. It made for an unsettling sight, the possession having rendered his one eye, which took up most of his face, completely black.

Cloaked as they were in the shadows, though, Rei could slip away unseen and quickly retreat back to where the three Pluggs were waiting in the generator room, not making a sound as they got inside and swiftly climbed to the rafters. “We have incoming,” they reported, dropping down and landing silently.

There was no particular reason for doing so; Rei simply enjoyed dropping from rafters.

Kupfer, the Plugg closest to their landing spot, jumped when they spoke. “Stars above, Rei, don’t scare me like that,” she said. Glancing between them and the door to the generator room, she then confusedly asked, “Wait, how did you even get in without us noticing?”

“Two beings of Darkness and King Doo approach,” Rei stated without elaborating on Kupfer’s question. “I fear our odds of victory are slim.”

Licht narrowed his eyes. “Be that as it may, Princess Twilight has entrusted us with the defense of the generator, so we will delay for as long as possible.” He stepped forward, sparks beginning to flicker between his prongs as he turned to address the other Pluggs. “Kupfer, Strom, us three will focus on King Doo. Rei, we’ll be relying on you to keep the Darkness off our backs.”

Rei gave a sharp nod, pulling out and inspecting one of their kunai. “I shall be your shadowed assassin, for the Darkness has made a mockery of my art.”

“Drama queen,” Kupfer muttered under her breath. Rei pretended not to hear her.

“What about the generator?” Strom asked. “Shouldn’t one of us stay here to maintain it?”

Licht shook his body, as Pluggs didn’t exactly have a proper head to perform that motion with. “That’ll run itself for a while,” he explained. “We just need to give it some juice every now and again when it slows down from friction.”

The generator was, in essence, just like a smaller, gas-powered model. It spun a magnet inside a coil of wire (or, in the case of Castle Dedede’s generator, on account of it needing to power the entire castle, several magnets inside several coils of wire), but it needed some energy to start with to spin the rotors. In a gas generator that was an internal combustion engine, but Castle Dedede’s generator was started and maintained by the castle’s Pluggs.

There were usually quite a few Pluggs that charged the rotors when they started to slow down, and the teams of them worked in shifts—with the occasional Sparky helping out here and there when available. But there were only three Pluggs there now—Rei honestly had no idea where the Darkness had taken the rest of them—and it had already visibly taken quite a bit out of the three to get the generator up and running. But if Rei knew anything about Lieutenant Licht, they knew that he, much like every other member of Dedede’s military, wasn’t one to throw in the towel that easily.

They’d all at least give the Darkness one heck of a fight first.

“Alright then,” Licht said, snapping the others’ attention to him, “let’s move out.”

Rei slipped back into the shadows with ease, silencing their steps and darting up to the far more comfortable rafters. Well, Rei supposed that they weren’t exactly rafters, as they weren’t supporting the roof directly, but they served a similar structural purpose for the lower levels of Castle Dedede. And they were the perfect spot for Rei to hide and observe the Darkness from.

Kupfer was the first of the Pluggs to arrive on the scene, letting out a war cry and charging forward at King Doo. Sparks flew between her prongs as she ran, and the distinct crackle of electricity filled the air. King Doo was unphased, though, and his blackened eye seemed to glint as the Darkness began its beam attack.

A Waddle Doo’s (and thus King Doo’s) beam usually gave off considerable amounts of light. After all, its dazzling nature was half the attack, since a blinded opponent was massively disadvantaged, and Waddle Doos, despite the massive eyeball, were resistant against being blinded by their own attacks. Their pupils would contract whenever they were attacking, preventing the beam attack from being self-defeating.

The Darkness, however, seemed to do things differently. When King Doo unleashed his beam, it seemed to darken the hall simply by existing. Despite the lights remaining on and Kupfer’s electricity staying strong, the peripherals of Rei’s vision faded as their spirits quieted a bit and their senses seemed to numb. Even Kupfer faltered at the attack, her forward momentum slowing.

And then a glob of plasma slammed into King Doo’s left nub, courtesy of Licht. He aborted his beam attack, drawing back to heal the burn. In an instant, Rei’s senses returned to them, and they threw a kunai at the blob of Darkness that had started to make for Kupfer. The kunai speared through it, dragging it to the floor long enough for Kupfer to make it to King Doo. He spasmed as electricity coursed through him, but the Darkness fought through it and warped one of King Doo’s nubs into a proper arm.

Rei felt ill just watching it.

The nub-arm, now a solid ten times its original length, backhanded Kupfer to knock her away from King Doo (despite the nub still lacking a hand). She hit the wall with a pained grunt, but was still conscious and able to fight. The Darkness was prevented from following up on the attack, though, by a second blob of plasma that seared straight through the extended arm.

The Darkness didn’t even seem phased, simply dropping the destroyed arm with a sickening squelch and growing a new nub. As King Doo turned his attention towards Licht, though, it gave Strom an opening to charge in. The blob of Darkness that Rei had pinned earlier had ripped itself off of the kunai and was back in the air, unfortunately, so both blobs went for him during his charge. Another kunai took down one of them, but the other was getting too close for Rei to feel comfortable throwing another one—the chances of them missing and hitting Strom by mistake were getting higher every moment.

Instead, they dropped from the ceiling, blade at the ready, to engage the Darkness themself. Their blade sliced the blob in twain, letting Strom safely run past, and Rei was back in the shadows and climbing back into the rafters before it could reform itself. Unfortunately, they were being pursued by the Darkness, as the blob that they had taken down with a kunai earlier had gotten back up once again.

Still, Rei couldn’t afford to forget their mission. A third kunai kept the other Darkness blob—which had just reconstituted itself—down long enough for Licht to rush past it so that he, Strom, and Kupfer could converge on King Doo simultaneously. As Rei watched the three of them do their best to try and knock the Darkness out of King Doo, they tried to throw another one behind them at the Darkness blob in pursuit, but their aim was finally off for once and the kunai embedded itself into a beam. Stopping, Rei drew their blade to at least try and get this blob off of their tail.

Perhaps it would’ve worked, but just as the Darkness blob got within swinging range, the hallway once again was thick with that feeling of apathy—King Doo must’ve used a beam attack again. Rei stilled with their blade pointed straight outward, and the Darkness took the fastest path forward, impaling itself upon the blade. But with King Doo’s attack passively sapping Rei’s emotions, the Darkness could keep moving down to the hilt without consequence.

It was a slow, agonizing few moments as Rei watched the Darkness pull its way over the hilt like some kind of eldritch slime mold. They knew that they should move, or even just drop the blade, but whatever King Doo was doing made it nigh impossible to even want to move. They just…didn’t feel like it.

The moment the Darkness made contact with Rei’s hand, though, it was over. Their world went Dark.

Meta Knight had already slain eight beings of Darkness—three sent to him by Spike and five that had found the kitchen on their own—when the lights shut off. On its own, this would not be a major problem for him, as Astrals had excellent night vision. The issue was that the power went out when he was in the middle of a fight, and his eyes still needed time to adjust to darkness.

As soon as the others had dispersed, he’d made sure that the interior of the kitchen was secure before stepping out into the hallway, closing the door behind him. Sailor’s recovery was a priority, so he refused to take a fight into her proximity, especially while she was still unconscious. As such, the three spheres of Darkness that Spike had sent him had been dealt with swiftly, Galaxia’s properties allowing him to simply cut them down in the hallway. The other five had been a patrolling squad of castle residents: two Waddle Dees, a Waddle Doo, and two Burning Leos. Had the group stumbled upon Kawasaki or Bugzzy, perhaps they would have stood a chance, but against Galaxia the Darkness possessing them was helpless.

After purging the Darkness from them (which was a somewhat arduous task, as Meta had to ensure that he did not stab or slice its victims in any ways that would be fatal or leave permanent injury), he’d directed them into the kitchen to heal themselves. A few minutes later, though, a Gigant Edge of all things had lumbered their way down the hall, so now Meta Knight was defending the kitchen not only for Sailor, but also for the five other vulnerable beings in the room.

The fight was more like a puzzle for Meta Knight to begin with. While the Gigant Edge certainly was dangerous—he would be in trouble if any of their strikes made contact—their slow, lumbering sword swings left ample time for Meta Knight to dodge. Unfortunately, he did need to actually break their skin for Galaxia to work its magic and expel the Darkness, and the Gigant Edge’s armor made that difficult. His two options were to either spend so long fighting that he could wear down the armor enough to break off a piece—which wasn’t exactly an appealing prospect—or to go for the slit in the helmet. Meta had been attempting the latter, but getting that close left him vulnerable to a strike from either the Gigant Edge’s sword or shield.

Then the lights shut off just as the Gigant Edge began raising their sword for a blow, and because of the timing Meta Knight couldn’t tell where the strike was going. A quick flap of his wings took him well outside of the Edge’s range, however, and a crash rang out as the massive sword slammed into the floor. Now, though, the lack of lighting was going to be a major annoyance.

He needed to find some way to disarm them, and probably some way to get rid of the shield, too. With the Gigant Edge’s armor including gauntlets, though, he’d have to physically overpower them to do so. While he trusted in his ability to do such a thing—Astrals were an unusually strong species to begin with, and he made sure to stay in top form on top of that—against a Gigant Edge he would only be able to deal with the sword or the shield at once. He’d have to get creative.

The Gigant Edge recovered from their failed strike quickly, and soon enough they were charging at Meta Knight once again, sword raised for a devastating blow. Or he at least assumed, based on the sounds; his eyes hadn’t quite yet adjusted to the lower light levels. Still, he darted to the side and into the air, once more dodging the swing, and he smiled as he heard the sword hit the ground hard enough to embed itself. Flipping around, he springboarded off of the wall, Galaxia outstretched. But he wasn’t aiming for the Gigant Edge’s helmet—no, the Darkness would react far too quickly and raise the shield for that.

With their sword still embedded in the ground, they raised their shield, as Meta Knight expected. Before Galaxia could be deflected, though, Meta shifted in the air with another flap of his wings, reorienting himself and letting him shove Galaxia behind the shield, attempting to use it as a lever. Unfortunately, with the darkness pervading the hallway he’d had to make several estimates, and his aim was ever so slightly off. Instead of jamming his sword into the junction between the Gigant Edge’s gauntlet and shield (with the added leverage allowing him to pry the shield off through sheer strength, despite it being welded to the gauntlet), Galaxia glanced off of the gauntlet at an angle, forcing Meta to hurriedly retreat further into the air.

His hasty retreat came just in time, as the Gigant Edge’s sword swung through the space he had just occupied. While he was hovering out of range, though, he could plan a bit. Clearly, until his eyes properly adjusted—which would take a couple minutes at best—that strategy was likely doomed to failure. But if he couldn’t get in close without undue risk to himself, how else could he disarm them?

Then the kitchen door slammed open, and Meta Knight’s salvation came in the form of a pair of very determined Burning Leos.

Without warning, the hallway was bathed in a fiery glow as they unleashed twin streams of flame at the Gigant Edge. The Darkness was forced to react if it didn’t want to lose its greatest advantage—its host’s armor—so it raised their shield to intercept. Slowly, they started to force their way through the flames to try and get to the Burning Leos, but Meta knew that the Darkness wouldn’t even make it halfway there.

Because he finally had an opening.

In an instant, he had flown from his position near the ceiling back down to the Gigant Edge’s eye level. The Darkness futilely raised their sword, attempting to swing it back down with enough force to crack Meta Knight’s mask, resolve, and quite possibly his skull. But instead of getting even close to him, the sword was stopped in its tracks midair as it was caught on one of Galaxia’s prongs.

On most swords, such prongs would be a major liability. For much the same reason that swords are not usually serrated, a sword with those sorts of prongs would just snag on something internal the moment someone was stabbed with it, leaving its wielder effectively disarmed in the middle of a battlefield. But Galaxia was special for two reasons. For one, its shape was optimized for whatever magicks had been involved in its creation to be efficient specifically at combating the Darkness.

And for another, its material was unlike anything else Meta Knight knew. Galaxia was made of a gold-mithril alloy that had extremely unique magical properties. The fact that it had been forged in the first place implied that it had been malleable at some time in the past, but in the modern day it was harder than even diamond while managing to share none of the weaknesses of the gemstone’s crystal structure. The blade never dulled, despite centuries, maybe even millennia of use. His great-great-great grandmother once claimed that it could cleave through even nuclear pasta, but that wasn’t a hypothesis that Meta was willing to test.

Unfortunately, whatever process had been used to make such a magically potent alloy had been lost to time, despite his family’s many attempts to recreate it over the centuries. Meta Knight personally suspected that there were likely some spells involved during Galaxia’s forging that the Astrals simply no longer knew, as even recreating the ratio of gold to mithril exactly did not yield the desired results. Regardless, meant that Galaxia was likely the strongest sword in the Gamble Galaxy, and quite possibly one of, if not the most powerful weapon in the known universe.

So when faced with the steel of a Gigant Edge’s sword, the inferior metal stood no chance. A sword makes a far better fulcrum than armor, so with the shield out of the way Meta Knight was finally able to simply twist Galaxia to get his desired results. With a horrible screech as the steel buckled and deformed, the Gigant Edge’s sword cracked and chipped and snapped under the pressure, Galaxia proving its strength once more. Before the Darkness could even hope to react to that, Meta Knight darted forward with Galaxia in front of him. The added firelight meant that his aim was true, and the sword slipped right into the helmet’s sight. Meta was careful, of course, to make sure that Galaxia only just barely grazed the Gigant Edge’s skin, but that was all the sword needed to work its magic.

The gem embedded in Galaxia’s guard glowed as it worked to expel the Darkness from its host. Against a larger creature, like Spike had been at Dark Castle, stabbing a single limb wouldn’t have been enough to expel the Darkness entirely—it had just lost control of Spike’s arm, after all—but the comparatively small size of a Gigant Edge meant just a nick was enough. They twisted unnaturally a few times as a dark miasma rose off of their armor, but Meta Knight stood by unperturbed. Eventually, the Gigant Edge stilled—they would be unconscious for a few minutes—as a sphere of Darkness formed from the miasma above them.

Meta Knight cut it down before it even had a chance to move.

With the Darkness gone, the Burning Leos let up their fire breath. The Gigant Edge’s shield was a mess and they would likely require treatment for the burns on their left hand, but they were free from the Darkness’s control. “Thank you,” Meta Knight said, giving the two Burning Leos an appreciative nod.

Before the two could get a word out, though, a wisp of green flame appeared in front of him. Meta Knight prepared to slice another sphere of Darkness to ribbons, but instead of the parasite he was expecting, Spike’s messenger flame spat out a rock. It looked like a piece of rubble, and was carved with some sort of writing. It wasn’t Somnic, though, and Meta recognized it as a language that Sunset had shown him the written form of some time earlier: Ponish. The piece of rubble was chipped around the writing, indicating that Spike had hurriedly carved it with his own claws.

Despite not being able to read it, the message still got across. Something was wrong.

“Get the Gigant Edge into the kitchen and prepare some food for when they awaken,” Meta Knight ordered, snapping out his wings and taking to the air.

Without waiting for a response, he shot down the hallway as fast as he could.

Spike was hesitantly optimistic as he and Twilight approached Castle Dedede’s throne room. Things had gone well so far, with Twilight having been able to focus almost entirely on getting her shield ready. The first thing they’d encountered, a Broom Hatter, went down easily. Their broom was quite flammable, and they proved to be just as susceptible to an electrified cast-iron skillet as Bugzzy was. The second enemy they’d come across was a Waddle Dee, and the Darkness possessing them suffered the same fate.

Just before making it to the throne room, they had found a Knuckle Joe. He had put up enough of a fight to force Twilight to assist, even if it was just a series of atmokinetic spells aimed at his feet. He eventually tripped and Spike could finally land a solid hit with his frying pan, but Twilight mentioned that it had cost her maybe a minute or two of preparation. Still, it could’ve been worse, and Spike was just happy that she was good enough at multitasking (he’d seen her organize all of Golden Oaks at once; she was scarily proficient at it) that it hadn’t wasted the last hour and a half.

Regardless, as the pair made their way to the opulent doors of Dedede’s throne room, Spike was hopeful that their plan had worked. Hopeful that the Darkness’s forces were spread thin throughout Castle Dedede, too focused on their distractions to put up a sizable force against him and Twilight.

Then the doors opened and all Tatarus broke loose.

Immediately, Twilight tossed up a shield in front of them, blocking the wave of attacks that would have swept them away without it. Everything from spears to water to even Rockies themselves bounced off of the shield that just barely poked into the room, and it took a couple seconds for everything to clear so that Spike could get a good grasp on what they were up against. From what he could see, the throne room contained three Rockies, two Driblees, a Grizzo, no fewer than four spear-wielding Waddle Dees, a Simirror, a Knuckle Joe, and two Parasol Dees.

And in the center of it all was Bandana Dee himself.

Wordlessly, he pointed his spear towards Twilight and Spike, prompting the throne room to explode into action. The Knuckle Joe picked up the nearest Rocky and hurled them at the shield like a discus. The Grizzo charged forward, their claws glinting ominously. Two of the Spear Dees threw their weapons, and the Parasol Dee nearest to the shield took a swing.

Twilight winced as the hits connected, and Spike didn’t waste time waiting for her concentration to potentially waver. He charged forward, skillet at the ready and armed with the knowledge of how basic shields worked. One couldn’t hang around two of the most talented mages in Equestria for one’s entire life without picking up some knowledge on the subject, at least.

The most basic of shields—and thus the type of shield that Twi probably cast on instinct—blocked two things: direct magical attacks and physical matter. They did nothing to stop energy transfers across the barrier; doing things like maintaining a temperature differential or disrupting an electric or magnetic field required a specialized spell. So when Spike brought down his skillet right next to the unfortunate Parasol Dee that was right by the shield, while the barrier could physically stop any electrons from getting through, it didn’t stop it from inducing a charge in the parasol itself, which proceeded to give the Dee a rather nasty shock.

The forces of Darkness backed off a bit at that, letting Spike and Twilight advance a few steps forward. Grinning, Spike let flames lick behind his teeth and his off hand crackled with sparks. If this kept up, Twilight would be able to get off her castle-wide shield in a few minutes and the day would be saved. Or, well, Castle Dedede’s day would be saved.

But then the lights shut off, and suddenly the momentum shifted.

The throne room was awash with the violet of Twilight’s shield and horn, casting an eerie purple glow over everything and everyone. Everything was still visible, though dim, but before they could react to it, the space in front of Spike seemed to crack like a shattered mirror as the Simirror teleported in. The little dragon reacted instinctively and tried to grab the Simirror with his already-sparking hand, and while he did successfully make contact, that was what the Darkness had wanted.

A Simirror’s form of teleportation was something that Spike hadn’t experienced before and it wasn’t something that he wanted to experience again. For a moment, his world shattered into a hall of mirrors, as up became down and left became right. He stared his own reflection in the face countless times in under a second in a way that was rather similar to how it felt going through Star Swirl’s Mirror.

When his world finally righted itself and reality was back in a single piece, he was in the middle of the throne room and, more pressingly, outside of the shield. The Simirror was unconscious, as teleporting while being shocked proved to be too much for them. In the brief moment before anything else happened, Spike’s eyes met Twilight’s. He could see that she was preparing to drop her shield to properly help, but he shook his head. She needed to focus on casting the final shield.

She’d probably help out anyway with minor spells, though, so all Spike could really do there was hope that she stayed focused on the end goal.

Then that moment ended, thrusting Spike into the thick of battle. Immediately, he had to duck to avoid a thrown Rocky, which hit the wall behind him hard enough to send chunks of marble flying every which way. He retaliated by sending a stream of fire towards the Knuckle Joe that threw them, but it was blocked and neutralized by an attack from a Driblee.

Without warning, he stumbled a few paces forward as something slammed into his back. He spun around and swung with his frying pan on instinct, and a thunk rang out as the cooking implement impacted the Parasol Waddle Dee that had attacked him. They went down instantly, but Spike didn’t have time to really note that before he was spinning around again, fire building in his throat, at the sound of a guttural roar. The Grizzo was charging him with the second Parasol Dee on their back.

His first instinct was to unleash his flame, but as soon as he did another stream of water hit him right in the face, courtesy of one of the Driblees. Sputtering, Spike could do nothing but dive to the side as the Grizzo’s claws just barely missed him. Now prone on the floor as the Grizzo charged past, he caught a glimpse of movement in his peripheral and rolled right, dodging another Rocky that otherwise would’ve hit him in the head.

That roll, though, brought him face-to-face with a piece of rubble, and Spike had an idea. As he scrambled to his feet, he grabbed the shard of stone and stuck his claw into it. Between the resistance from the rock itself and having to hold the frying pan with the same claw as he was writing with, the penmanship was horrid, but he hoped that it’d be enough to get the message through. With a puff of green flame too short for the Driblees to counter, the stone vanished from his hand just in time for him to raise the frying pan and block one heck of a haymaker from Knuckle Joe.

Spike mentally apologized to Kawasaki as the skillet dented under the force, a section of the pan now bending inward. A sickening crunch reached Spike’s ears as multiple bones in the Joe’s hand broke against it, but that didn’t even seem to faze the Darkness. Spike yelped and ducked as the Knuckle Joe’s left hand whiffed just above his spines, and he tried to electrify the pan in response.

Unfortunately, the Joe just jumped away before they could be properly shocked, picking up a Rocky with their still-healing right hand. With the rock creature hurtling directly at him immediately after, Spike tried to get out of the way, but it turned out that the Darkness wasn’t aiming for him. Instead, the Rocky slammed into the frying pan so hard that it was wrenched out of Spike’s hands, sending it hurtling across the room.

That did leave that Rocky nearby, though, meaning that when the Knuckle Joe’s next attack came, Spike instincitively grabbed them to block with and they took it for him. Of course, that also sent the Rocky flying again, but it gave him another idea on how to deal with the Grizzo that had, by now, turned around and was ready to charge again.

Spike dove to the side again to dodge Knuckle Joe’s next hit, taking him ever so slightly closer to the Grizzo, which roared and began another charge. He rolled over and scrambled to his feet just in time to avoid Joe’s fist, which hit the ground hard enough to crack the floor. Now the Grizzo was just before him, and Spike gulped as he gazed upon the bear-like creature’s sharp teeth and claws. Even with his scales protecting him from most things, he didn’t want to chance that.

But, just as he’d hoped, he didn’t have to. He hit the deck right in time to dodge the Knuckle Joe’s next attack: a leaping punch. Right as the Grizzo was bearing down on him, Joe smacked right into their face, stopping the bear right in their tracks and knocking them both out of the fight. The Parasol Dee went flying, but instead of smacking into the wall or Twilight’s shield like Spike had wanted, they stuck out their Parasol and gently floated to the ground.

It was no matter, though, as when Spike emerged from the Grizzo-Knuckle Joe pileup, all it took was reaching out once with electrified claws to shock them into unconsciousness.

Panting, Spike looked around. Without Knuckle Joe to throw them, the Rockies’ threat level had been massively reduced. The four Spear Dees were occupied, as what magic Twilight could cast while keeping her concentration included enough atmoturgy to keep them from throwing their spears at Spike. And Bandana Dee wasn’t even moving, instead just staring at Spike with blackened eyes, which was admittedly rather terrifying. Still, maybe he hadn’t needed to call for hel-

Bandana Waddle Dee moved.

This wasn’t the usual waddling motion of a Waddle Dee, though. He almost seemed to blur as he shot across the room directly at Spike, and the snapping sound that rang out indicated that the Darkness had broken at least one of Bandee’s feet to accomplish that. He was leaping through the air faster than Spike would have any hope of reacting to, with his left nub grotesquely extending and growing out into a full arm, even including finger-like protrusions at its tip. Reaching out, the Darkness grabbed Spike’s forehead.

His world went black.

The Darkness in charge of securing Castle Dedede knew that its position was of strategic importance. The main—and likely only—challenge in securing Stellarium would be the Voidspawn it homed, but the Darkness had a lucky break there. This Voidspawn was young, and hadn’t come into, or was perhaps unaware of, its full power. It was nothing like what the Aeon Hero had been.

No, once Nebula was recovered and the Dreamwater was dealt with, the Voidspawn calling itself “Kirby” would fall easily to the Whole. But there was no need to take undue risks, so to prevent any aid from coming to the Voidspawn, the Darkness had taken positions to prevent that. The Darkness securing Castle Dedede, the Meta-Knights’ complex, and the Rainbow Islands thus had some of the most important jobs in the Whole’s takeover of Stellarium.

The Darkness knew from the telepathic data package sent by its failed scout that the dragon before it was a previous host of the Darkness, and his power had been aptly demonstrated over the past minute. All that made him an ideal host, and the Darkness was far from shy when it came to swapping to a more powerful host.

So it delved into the dragon's mind, expecting to transfer bodies easily, before it was suddenly completely stalled.

No.

What?

No, not again. Never again.

The Darkness pushed harder, but to no avail.

The dragon’s Heart beat ever louder.

I won’t be your puppet again! Get OUT!

In a rare new experience for the Darkness, it was ejected from a potential host, ending up back in the Waddle Dee’s body. The dragon’s eyes were wide and still emerald green, but in only a moment he seemed to realize that he had just successfully repelled the Darkness. That wasn’t something that had happened in a very, very long time.

Still, the Darkness had other ways of dealing with a threat, and it readied the spear it was holding in order to go on the attack. But before it could, something shot into the throne room over the purple one’s shield (which was a threat that the Darkness had hoped to neutralize by now), and the Darkness actually recoiled. Very few things could make the Darkness approximate emotion. Fewer still could make it approximate fear.

Darkness’s Bane was one of those things.

Desperate to do anything to deter that annoying Astral and the horrible sword he wielded, the Darkness leapt for the Simirror’s unconscious body.

Twilight wasn’t quite sure what to make of the situation after Meta Knight arrived. He had quickly taken care of the four Spear Dees, Driblees, and Rockies, meaning that she could get back to finishing casting the castle-wide shield. Only a few more moments, and Castle Dedede would be free.

Then the Darkness possessing Bandee touched the Simirror, and things got strange.

There was a squelching sound as flesh was reshaped, but at the end of it both Bandee and the Simirror looked unchanged. Bandee’s nub was even back to being a nub! The only odd thing was that he was holding the Simirror’s staff in his left hand.

And then when Meta Knight brought Galaxia down on him, he waved the staff. The air shimmered as a mirror-like shield appeared, and Meta’s eyes widened. He quickly flapped his wings to avoid actually hitting the shield with Galaxia. He veered upward, but the downdraft generated by his wings hitting the shield still reflected back at him, sending him off-balance.

Half a second later, the air in front of Twilight shimmered and cracked as Bandee teleported inside of her shield. His spear was raised and aimed right for her neck, and had he been seconds sooner she would have had to sacrifice multiple minutes of preparation to defend herself. But she was ready.

The Element of Magic pulsed almost eagerly as she dropped her earlier shield and formed a newer, smaller one containing herself and not much else. Her wings spread wide and she began levitating simply from the sheer amount of magic she was putting out. A pulse of magic shook the room and forced Bandee backwards before her spell finalized and her shield rapidly expanded.

The world went purple.

Perhaps it was the Fountain allowing her to sleep dreamlessly, perhaps it was the potency of maxim tomatoes, or perhaps it was because she knew the urgency of the information she held, but when Sailor Waddle Dee opened her eyes she was almost immediately coherent, despite the extreme pain in her lower right. She was in an infirmary of some sort, but not one of the Meta-Knights. Based on the stonework (and the Waddle Dee in a nurse’s outfit), it was probably Castle Dedede’s.

Well, at least Princess Twilight had done her job and the castle hadn’t fallen to the Darkness. It would make getting the complex back more complicated, though.

Thankfully, the person she most needed to speak to was by her bedside. “Sir Meta Knight,” she said somewhat weakly.

Meta Knight looked up from his book, and while she couldn’t see it behind his mask, Sailor was sure that he was smiling. “Sailor, it is good to see you awake. You were unconscious for a few hours.”

“What happened when I was out?”

“Miss Shimmer teleported away after she was possessed,” Meta Knight explained. “I retreated here, to Castle Dedede, to assist Princess Twilight in repelling the Darkness and to secure treatment for your burns.”

Curiously, she tried to move her foot, but nothing felt like it shifted around. Why would…

Sailor blinked. Oh.

She was an amputee.

She’d probably be properly shocked about that later, but she pushed through that right now. She had some information that she needed to share.

“Vul knows where Shimmer is.”

Meta Knight blinked in surprise. “Elaborate.”

Sailor took a breath. “The syringe that I grabbed wasn’t random; it was an experimental solution that Vul claimed might make maxim tomatoes obsolete.”

Meta nodded. “He’s discussed this with me. It uses nanites to simulate the effects of a tomato, yes?”

“Yeah,” Sailor confirmed, “but since Vul’s more paranoid than even you sometimes, Sir, he puts trackers on all of his inventions in case they’re used against him.”

Meta Knight’s eyes narrowed a bit at the implication that he was particularly paranoid before widening in realization. “So if we free Captain Vul from the Darkness…”

“He can find Shimmer,” Sailor finished.

Meta Knight shot to his feet, his eyes glinting in a way that Sailor knew meant that he was grinning. “I need to inform Princess Twilight and General Bandana Dee of this immediately.”

Sailor’s eyes reflected a grin right back. “How long until we can free the complex?”

“If all goes well,” Meta Knight said with a for once hopeful tone, “we’ll march on Orange Ocean tomorrow at first light.”

Author's Note

The Forces of Darkness
Castle Dedede is normally home to many creatures from Waddle Dees to Waddle Doos to Simirrors, but almost all of them have been taken by the Darkness! Now the Darkness has enhanced them further, beyond their natural capabilities, to fully take the castle.

Bandana Waddle Dee, the Darkened General
Bandana Waddle Dee is the General of King Dedede's military, second only to the King himself. While his skill with a spear is formidable, it is his strategic mind that is the true threat. But whether the Darkness makes use of that is up to it...

Bit of a long one today! Not the longest chapter yet, but it's up there with Storming the Violet Castle, which, come to think of it, is another chapter about taking a castle from the Darkness. Well they're fortifications for a reason, I guess—taking one is always going to be difficult.

Prologue: On Mirrors and the Breaking Thereof

Sneaking through the Crystal Palace was honestly a far simpler endeavor than Sunset Shimmer had thought it would be. Her little brother having figured out where she had disappeared to and begging her to come home was an unpleasant surprise at first, but she had quickly realized that she could turn the situation around and milk Sunburst for information with him being none the wiser. He had made the Crystal Empire sound like an impregnable fortress, protected by the strongest of shield magicks and the fiercest military on the continent.

Instead, Sunset found herself rolling her eyes as she walked unhindered with no more protection than a cloak and a wallflower spell. Another pair of guards trotted past her, chatting with each other about one of the new maids. Even the noise of her knocking over a vase of some sort as she got used to being quadrupedal again had been brushed off, the two guards that discovered it even blaming each other for the noise.

Clearly, if this was representative of the Guard at large, she’d have to make some changes to it once she took over the world.

Sunset grinned to herself. Once she got her hooves on the Element of Magic and figured out how to turn herself into an alicorn, Equestria wouldn’t know what hit it. And once she was Queen, Equus would be but putty in her hooves. Finally, finally, Celestia would know just how large of a mistake she made when she tossed her aside. Perhaps she could even get her brother to see reason and the two could rule together.

She was shaken out of her fantasies of the Great Queen Sunset and the Not-As-Great Prince Sunburst as she rounded the next corner. Her grin widened. Now this looked like a hallway with rooms fit for a princess. The feeling as she stalked forward practically confirmed it as well. The pressure on her horn, the sheer power she felt emanating from one room, was so thick she could almost taste it. The Element of Magic had to be there. And so, with a soundproofing charm on the hinges and her reinforcing her night vision charm, Sunset swung open the door.

True to form, the giant hunk of crystal moved soundlessly through the air and Sunset could see inside perfectly. A young dragon slept in a padded basket near the nightstand and a purple alicorn snored peacefully on the bed. The thief grit her teeth upon seeing the latter. Twilight Sparkle, the usurper. Her replacement. From everything that Sunburst had told her, Twilight was the mare that had stolen all that was rightfully hers. Idly, Sunset wondered if Miss Sparkle knew that she was naught but a pawn in Celestia’s great game of politics, molded to replace what Sunset could have been had she not broken free from the Princess’s shackles and sought power for herself.

Her eyes then fell upon the crown sitting on the nightstand, or more specifically the jewel embedded in it. The Element of Magic. Running a quick diagnostic spell over the area, she moved forward as quietly as possible. She stopped short once the spell’s results got back to her, though–not in worry, but in surprise. Sunset ran the spell again. Surely an artifact as important and powerful as this had at least some defenses…or not. Upon the results turning up negative once again, Sunset mentally shrugged and levitated the crown into her saddlebags. She wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

She momentarily paused. That turn of phrase worked on Earth, but not so much on Equus. She was back to work soon, though, choosing to contemplate the implications of that after the heist.

Quickly, she examined the replica Element she had crafted based on Sunburst’s description. For being made of paper mache and with Sunset having never seen the actual artifact, it was surprisingly good. Still, it wouldn’t fool anypony for more than a second, but she didn’t need it to as it was. A quick self-sustaining illusion spell took care of that. As long as nopony thought to check the Element for any spells for a few days, and given the lack of defenses she suspected nopony would, she would be safely in the human world with the mirror closed behind her before anypony noticed anything amiss. She would have two full years to drop out of the high school she had been hiding out in, forge some new documentation, and experiment on the Element of Magic.

Sunset smiled giddily as she placed the false Element on the nightstand (by hoof, this time; she wanted to make sure the illusion held up) and turned around, ready to exit the room. So happy she was with her near-successful heist, in fact, she forgot about the dragon-sized obstacle between her and the door and promptly tripped on his tail.

It was then, as Spike rolled over in his sleep, that Sunset made her first and only mistake, but one that cost her the heist. She reflexively opened her mouth.

“Shit!”

Had she not swore aloud, she might have succeeded. Spike was a heavy sleeper, after all, and tripping on his tail would not have woken him. Twilight was a heavy enough sleeper that the tinkling of gold on crystal as the Element of Magic spilled out of Sunset’s saddlebags and skidded across the floor would not have woken her. But alas, Sunset’s expletive of surprise woke the purple mare from her slumber.

Twilight’s eyes flicked around as she yawned herself awake, but she jolted upright when the little light from outside glinted off of her Element. Eyes wide and very much awake, Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria repeatedly glanced between the Element of Magic and the cloaked figure that had gotten back to her hooves.

For a small moment, there was silence as Sunset and Twilight stared at each other in the dark. The two mares were locked in a standoff, neither quite sure what to do in this situation. That is, until Twilight opened her mouth, and Sunset decided that she was too far in to just cut her losses.

“I’d love to stay and chat,” Sunset said, cutting Twilight off, “but I’ve gotta bounce.”

She grabbed the Element of Magic and bolted, making it out the door, closing it behind her, and running considerably far down the hall before Twilight’s first cries of “Thief!” reached her ears. An explosion followed soon after, as the door to Twilight’s room blasted open and discharged a large amount of expanding air, a suddenly wide awake young dragon, and what looked to be bits of flaming bedsheets. Sunset winced and resisted the urge to rub the base of her horn. Clearly she had forgotten to remove the soundproofing charm on the hinges and whatever Twilight had just done had shattered them. The hinges, not the charm–well, the charm itself had gone with it, but the doors were pretty clearly on the floor. The alicorn herself emerged moments later, fury in her eyes and moving so quickly that she lost her hoofing on the smooth crystal floor and shoulder-checked the wall.

Sunset just ran faster, not even bothering to let out the string of obscenities that she wanted to. It had not been in the plan to antagonize any of the alicorns until she was one herself. Directly engaging with one–even one as new to the power as Princess Twilight–would be detrimental to her health. And, if what Sunburst had told her was right, all four known alicorns were in the building.

In hindsight, Sunset’s heist attempt was a stupidly risky plan she had put together over a lunch break. Ah well, she was in far too deep to turn back now. She spared a glance back at her pursuers. Twilight was charging after her with Spike on her back, and both looked pissed. The other doors were beginning to creak open as well, their occupants curious as to what commotion woke them up at such an odd hour of the morning. Sunset didn’t give them the chance to see her, though, lighting her horn and artificially dumping more power into her legs.

She needed the speed boost, too. Twilight, having latent access to earth pony magic, was both faster and stronger than her. After that display of blasting her door off its hinges, Sunset didn’t doubt that Twilight was far more powerful than her when it came to unicorn magic too, albeit with less control. The one advantage that Sunset had over her right now was that the princess still seemed half asleep and was solely focused on getting her crown back. Maybe it was the adrenaline taking over, but Sunset felt herself grinning wildly.

Applying a sticking charm to her right forehoof, she pivoted ninety degrees on it to make a turn in under half a second. The suddenness and sharpness of it forced Twilight to slow down while Sunset just kept moving, and the orange-furred mare’s eyes glistened as she caught sight of the room she was gunning for. She hurriedly glanced around as she ran to find something–anything–to make her escape easier in the meantime. Sure enough, her eyes fell on the vase and stand she had knocked over earlier.

Grateful that not using magic for a few years hadn’t weakened her one bit, she picked up the column-shaped stand in her telekinesis and hurled it backwards. She expected to hear it being caught as Twilight stopped moving suddenly, or perhaps even a thud as she ran into it face-first.

She did not expect a flash of violet light in front of her as Twilight teleported, but perhaps she should have. Alicorn, right. Well, two can play at that game.

A short charge of magic later, and Sunset popped through space in much the same manner. In an outpouring of aquamarine light, she arrived just outside of the room containing Star Swirl the Bearded’s Dimensional Mirror, sans her cloak. Turning to the momentarily dumbfounded alicorn, she gave a cocky grin and a mock salute before rushing into the room.

That brief expression of hubris proved to be her undoing, however, as Twilight soon followed her. In a moment of terror, Sunset realized the mare was gaining on her and she tried running even harder towards the Mirror. It didn't quite work, though, and she yelped as she felt the magical pressure in the room increase rapidly and ducked on intuition. Doing so allowed her to dodge a blast from the irate alicorn that instead struck the Mirror. Ordinarily, Sunset would have just kept running and hoped for the best, but the Mirror’s frame spontaneously changing color to a golden hue and the Mirror itself gaining a bluish tint actually gave her pause for once.

Unfortunately, Twilight, still adjusting to her new strength and rather clumsy as a result, did not stop. Instead, she crashed right into Sunset, and momentum carried the two ponies and a dragon right through the malfunctioning portal.

Nary a moment later, a rainbow blur sped into the room. Rainbow Dash would have flown right after them into the now-swirling vortex that was the Mirror, but she never got the chance. Before she or anypony else that was entering the room could do anything, the Mirror imploded.

Once Sunset came to, the first thing she noticed was her form. Four legs, a horn, fur–it seemed that she was still a pony and hadn’t been transfigured back into a human. Pity. She might have had access to magic as a pony, but Twilight was surely still monumentally pissed and she wouldn’t have had any experience in a human form.

The second thing she noticed was that her surroundings were surprisingly plush. The kind of plush that made one want to sink into their mattress and never get up. The kind of plush that Sunset hadn’t felt since Princess Celestia had shown her how to walk on…clouds.

She hadn’t cast a cloud-waking spell.

Her eyes shot open and she sat upright so quickly she almost fell off of the cloud she was on. Gulping, she looked downward. That was a good kilometer drop to the ground, at least. Lighting her horn, she considered how much mana it would take if she were to teleport versus if she self-levitated down. Too much either way, she thought, but she had to get off this cloud before Twilight realized that she was awake.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Sunset turned at the voice, surprised to see not Twilight, but her dragon friend speaking. Twilight herself was unconscious on the cloud next to him.

“Oh?” Sunset taunted, though it was false bravado. “And what would you do to stop me?”

Spike shrugged. “I can’t. But with the amount of magic you were flinging around back in the Crystal Empire, you probably wouldn’t make it to the ground without going splat.” He grinned, holding the Element of Magic. “Besides, I already pilfered your saddlebags. You’re not going anywhere until Twilight wakes up.”

Sunset sat down with a groan. Loath as she was to admit it, the young drake was right. She didn’t have nearly enough strength to make it down in one piece as she was now, and even if she did, magically taking something from a dragon that wanted it was notoriously difficult. She wouldn’t just kill him and take it either. Grand larceny, gaslighting, and forgery were all fair game to her, but she was above murdering a child, thank you very much. Besides, she needed Twilight alive and well to figure out what she did to the Mirror, and Sunset assumed that killing her friend wouldn’t award her any brownie points with the princess. She was running low on those as it was already.

“How are you awake, anyway?” She asked, deciding that she needed something to kill time. “Shouldn’t you have been knocked out with the rest of us?”

Spike cringed. “Dragons are a lot hardier than most ponies give us credit for.” He shivered. “I saw the whole thing in the Mirror. Speaking of,” he held up a shard of broken glass and pointed upward, “we’ve got a bit of a problem.”

Sunset slowly looked up at the Mirror–or at least, where the Mirror used to be. The glass was entirely gone, shattered as they passed through, she presumed. Its floating frame was in shambles, bent every which way and even torn apart in some places. Even as she looked, a piece of it ripped off and began its long journey to the ground.

The decrepit Mirror, however, was not what caught Sunset’s eye. No, even as disappointing as that was, she was mostly paying attention to what was above the Mirror. The night sky stretched from horizon to horizon, displaying its sparkling stars in foreign shapes. Sunset had spent long nights studying the stars both on Equus and on Earth, but never had she seen anything like this. And the stars were only part of the story, for across the sky stretched two great, ethereal arches, glistening in the light provided by not one, not two, but three moons.

Sunset felt her jaw drop. This was entirely new to her. She was still expecting to have wound up on Earth, but given how it felt like clouds worked here she suspected that they were in a new universe altogether. Really, she only had one response to it.

“Oh shit.”

Author's Note

Here it is: the first story I've decided to post on this site. As I mentioned in the description, it draws heavy inspiration from A Sweetie Dreamland by Lucar, at least in its premise (go read that, it's great). This story, though, will be executed differently. We've got a dragon and two scholars from Equestria hanging around on Popstar now (even if one of the two is a power-hungry megalomaniac). Twilight and Sunset will definitely have to work together to get back home, and hey, maybe they'll learn something about friendship along the way.

Chapter XI: The Hero of Dreamland

The tension in Castle Dedede was so palpable that Sunset felt like she could cut it with a knife. As soon as they had returned, the extrauniversal guests stored the Star Rod fragment in the castle treasury, hopeful that the various other golden objects would camouflage the fragment well, if it came to that. Bandee had joined them not long after, delivering his two fragments in only a few hours. The next several hours had been spent preparing for what both Bandee and Sunset felt was inevitable: Kirby’s arrival. Neither had high hopes for either Kirby’s defeat or convincing him to stop, but with the world on the line, they prepared nonetheless.

Kabula was in the air, prepared to fire at anything approaching from the sky. Ground troops had every entrance to Castle Dedede secured, dreading the third assault on the castle in under two months. Everyone inside the castle that could fight had taken up arms, wielding everything from swords to staves to even brooms. After ensuring that everyone was ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice, Bandee, Sunset, and Twilight had gathered in the throne room. It was, at this point, nearing evening and everyone was staring at Sunset’s communicator with bated breath.

Finally, just as the clock struck six, the object crackled to life. Meta Knight’s voice on the other end, though, boded poorly for their chances. “Kirby has bested me,” he reported, his voice sounding rather strained. “He has united six of the eight fragments and is headed your way.”

Sunset blanched and Twilight’s face held a shocked expression. Neither, though, responded quite the same way as Bandana Dee.

“What are we gonna do?” he wailed. “We can’t stop Kirby!”

Twilight took a deep breath. “But we have to try,” she countered.

“And if we fail?” Bandee asked.

“There is, perhaps, one additional hope,” Meta Knight said, and everyone turned back to look at the device. “Should Kirby successfully reassemble the Star Rod, there is a distinct possibility that he may be able to defeat the Nightmare himself.”

Sunset frowned. “I don’t think we should bank on what-ifs, though.”

“Do whatever you feel is right,” Meta Knight reassured. “I will be preparing the rest of the Meta-Knights to defend against Nightmare in a last-ditch effort, but for now, I leave the future to you.”

The communicator clicked off, and Bandee descended into panic. “We’re doomed,” he said, plopping himself down. He began hyperventilating, “We’re completely, utterly doomed. Kirby’ll just steamroll us, and there’s no telling if he can defeat Nightmare on his own!”

“Just because we probably can’t stop him doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try!” Twilight retorted. “The whole world’s counting on us to stop Nightmare from escaping!”

“That just makes it worse!” Bandee exclaimed.

Sunset drew in a shaky breath and looked Bandana in the eye. “Listen. I’m terrified of Kirby too. But…”

She trailed off, unsure of her own ideas. Where was this drive to stop Kirby even coming from? She’d spent over a decade caring most about her own self-interest, surely she should be getting as far away from Castle Dedede as possible.

She shook her head. Nightmare was the bigger overall threat here, she reminded herself. This was still the best option no matter what. “But if we don’t at least try,” she finished, “we might as well just hand the Star Rod right back over to Nightmare.”

Bandee took a deep breath and forced himself back to his feet. Gripping his spear, he nodded at Sunset. “Y’know what? You’re right.” He looked to the door and steeled himself. “You two head down to the boxing ring. It’s the only room in the castle really designed to take a fight. I’ll try to lead him your way.”

Twilight frowned. “But…what about you?”

Bandee shrugged. “I’ll try my best to make it out alright. I’ve got an army behind me, after all.” He grabbed his own communicator, linked to the castle’s PA system. “Kirby is on his way, everyone! I know he’s beaten us down twice before, but this time we have more on the line than just our pride! Kirby seeks to restore the Star Rod, which would release a powerful wizard called the Nightmare! We must stop him, at all costs!” Bandee took another, even deeper breath than before, seeming to try and psych himself up as much as his troops. “Even if we have to fight to the last man. I wish you all the best of luck.”

Spike crouched in the shadows, frowning at the scene he was watching. Twilight had told him to stay in their room while Kirby was in the castle, but he just couldn’t force himself to sit there and do nothing while Twilight put her life on the line again! No, he had to help in any way he could! He just…wasn’t entirely sure how to go about it. He knew that, if Bandee caught sight of him, he’d be back in the room before he knew it. So he stuck to the shadows, itching to jump in and help but unsure of when to do so.

Currently, Bandee was patrolling by Castle Dedede’s main entrance, watching the door as intently as Spike was. Kirby had arrived via the main gates both times he had attacked the castle before, and it seemed that Bandee suspected he would do so again. Spike didn’t really have any reason to doubt that, so he also watched the main entrance.

A massive crashing sound from outside alerted both of them to a new development. Spike gulped. He’d never actually gotten a chance to see Kabula in person before, but from what he’d heard of her, taking her down was no easy feat. After another quick sound of a short scuffle with the exterior guards, there was a polite knock on the door, heralding the appearance of a dangerous pink puff. After no one answered, Spike could swear he heard a huff of annoyance from outside before the doors slammed open.

Kirby seemed to be wearing a jetpack of some sort, a white metallic suit wrapping around his back and over his head. A blue visor completed the look, though Kirby wasn’t actively wearing it. Instead, his expression was on full display, though he seemed more mildly annoyed, rather than the anger Spike had expected.

“Good evening, Kirby,” Bandee stated, his voice wobbling slightly. “Any chance you’ll stop trying to put the Star Rod back together?”

Kirby narrowed his eyes.

“I’m not sure if Meta Knight already told you this,” Bandee tried to explain, “but putting the Star Rod back will release a being called Nightmare. We can’t risk that.”

Kirby huffed and readied a fighting stance.

Bandee sighed. “You think we’re lying, don’t you?” He raised his spear, readying his own stance as well. “Very well, then.”

Kirby launched forward with tremendous speed, Bandee just barely moving to block the blow in time. Spike felt his jaw drop. The only thing he’d ever seen move so fast was Rainbow Dash, and even she needed some time to accelerate first. The fact that Bandee managed to block something like that was just insane!

It didn’t stop there, either. Bandee gracefully twirled out of the way of Kirby’s next strike, a punch that instead significantly cracked the tiled floor. Bandee’s retaliatory strike went wide, however, as Kirby’s jetpack activated and he launched into the air. The pink puff hovered for a few moments before attempting to slam back down, forcing Bandee to jump out of the way. Kirby kept up the pressure, launching forward again with a spinning kick that Bandee was forced to use his spear to block.

This time, instead of just letting Bandana Dee get away with another dodge, Kirby feinted. He threw a punch with his left arm, even seeming to overextend, prompting Bandee to dodge in the opposite direction. Kirby, though, quickly activated his jetpack again, nimbly reversing his direction and turning his left hook into a right hook, allowing him to score a powerful blow on the bandana-clad general.

Bandee went flying, landing a good ways down the hall. He’d managed to keep himself upright, at least, planting his spear into the ground to slow down his slide. “Alright then,” he said, pulling out his PA microphone, “guess we have to pull out all the stops.” He clicked it on, and the sound of the PA system activating echoed throughout Castle Dedede. “Everyone! Defend the way to the boxing ring at all costs!”

Kirby huffed and pouted a bit as the castle came alive with the sounds of its many inhabitants mobilizing.

Bandee grinned with his eyes. “If you want this Star Rod fragment,” he said, wrenching his spear out of the ground, “we’re gonna make you work for it.”

With that, he turned and ran.

Kirby let out an angered cry and shot after him like a speeding bullet.

Spike couldn’t bring himself to move for a few moments, his eyes still as wide as dinner plates. His ideas of actually contributing anything to the fight, at this point, seemed sorely misplaced. There was no way in Tartarus he could stand up to something like Kirby–hay, he didn’t think even an adult dragon could stand up to Kirby!

He shook his head. No, he had to help Twilight! Bandee seemed like he had no hope of winning either and he tried to fight, so what kind of a dragon would Spike be if he didn’t stand up for his friends? A selfish one–that’s what. He shivered at the thought of ending up like Garble, but quickly realized that he needed to get a move on. The fight was moving on without him!

Thankfully, it seemed that Kirby hadn’t gotten far. Just beyond the castle’s antechamber was a line of unconscious Dreamlanders leading to the puffball of destruction, who was currently stalled in a one-on-one battle with the castle’s resident Bugzzy. Kirby, it seemed, had swapped out his jetpack for a green, glowing hat, sparking with energy every few seconds. As Spike watched, once again making sure to confine himself to the shadows, Kirby zigged and zagged around Bugzzy’s attempts to grapple him, ending up behind the poor beetle. Before Bugzzy could react, Kirby whirled around and delivered a devastating, green-coated punch to his back, downing him in an instant.

The moment Bugzzy was down, a Blade Knight tried to get the jump on Kirby from behind, but that ended extra poorly for him. Kirby whirled around and formed a barrier of green energy, forcing the Blade Knight to stumble as he tried to stop himself from falling into it. Not that it mattered, since Kirby simply launched the barrier forward and knocked the Blade Knight out anyway.

Kirby dusted off his hands and huffed in annoyance before once again rushing down the hall and ever closer to the boxing ring.

Spike tried his best to keep up, but at this point Kirby was moving so quickly all he knew of the battle were its sounds and its aftermath. Kirby’s trail of destruction was awesome–in the sense that it was terrifying. In his wake the puffball left the unconscious bodies of everyone he came across, be them Dee, Doo, Kibble, Blade Knight, Plugg, Broom Hatter, or any other castle resident. If they crossed Kirby, they did not win.

Finally, after a few minutes, several turns in the hallway, and a staircase, the sounds of battle ceased. Spike crept forward, somewhat curious as to what had stopped Kirby’s rampage. He peeked around the corner and immediately retreated. If he stepped out into the hallway, there was no way Bandee would miss him. All he could do was listen in.

“Alright, Kirby,” Bandee panted, “you might’ve torn through all of our defenses, but we’re not giving up. I can still fight–oh no.”

There was a loud sound akin to the sounds of Pinkie literally inhaling a spread of baked goods, and Spike thought he felt a faint breeze, despite the totally enclosed hallway. He shook his head. That couldn’t be right…right?

He spared a glance around the corner again and nearly sighed in relief. Kirby was gone, but so was Bandee for some reason. His eyes drifted upward to the massive set of double doors containing the boxing ring. They were slightly ajar, and Spike realized that Kirby must’ve gone in. His eyes narrowed. Sunset and Twilight were in there!

Gathering up his courage, he stepped forward and, as stealthily as possible, slunk into the room.

Sunset had thought that she had gotten a handle on her fear of Kirby. Sure, the little guy could probably end the world on purpose if he wanted to, but she’d never been scared of Celestia and she could definitely end the world.

Granted, Celestia had also never broken multiple of Sunset’s bones and set off a bomb in her face.

Regardless, Sunset assumed that she’d gotten pretty good control of her emotions. And that a measly little pink puffball being capable of nuclear-level strikes was a hilarious enough statement in and of itself that she should be able to get over it fairly quickly. Her plan was simple: simply don’t feel fear and fight accordingly.

Of course, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The moment Kirby became visible, once again wielding a spear, her heart rate spiked tremendously. Her pupils shrunk to pinpricks, and she subconsciously backed up a few steps. She silently cursed herself the whole way, of course, especially once she noticed that her ears had naturally flattened themselves again, too. Twilight, thankfully, completely failed to notice, her focus entirely devoted to the force of pure destruction entering the room.

So focused on Kirby, neither noticed the young dragon enter the room either, nor him slinking his way over to a shadowed audience’s seat.

Twilight fixed Kirby with a disappointed frown. “We can’t let you release Nightmare.”

Kirby rolled his eyes and huffed. “Lies,” he simply claimed.

Twilight seemed genuinely taken aback. “What?” she asked, shocked. “Now why would I-” she shook her head. “Never mind. I really don’t want to fight you, Kirby, but I will if I have to.” She lit her horn. “Please, give up trying to put the Star Rod back together.”

Kirby firmly shook his head, shifting his foot back.

Twilight sighed deeply. “So be it, then.”

Kirby charged forward, spear at the ready. In response, Twilight simply raised a shield, and Kirby’s first, experimental strike glanced off of it. Kirby repositioned himself immediately, as if expecting a retaliatory strike, but none came. Instead, it seemed that Twilight had taken the opportunity to set up, and a rotating collection of shields now surrounded her.

With a start, Sunset realized that Twilight wasn’t going to be attacking. She was clearly still holding on to the hope that she could talk Kirby down, or something. Sunset rolled her eyes and lit her horn as well. Clearly she was going to be doing most of the offensive work, here.

Kirby, thankfully, was focused on trying to break through Twilight’s shields with limited success. It seemed like he was still using a spear suboptimally, slashing with it instead of stabbing, which was probably contributing to his inability to break through any of Twilight’s defenses. His single-minded determination allowed Sunset to sneak behind him undetected until she unleashed her first attack.

Flames danced around her horn as she called upon her talent for pyroturgy. A spiral of fire shot out moments after, but unfortunately Kirby must have felt the increased temperature. Nimbly, he dodged out of the way and whirled around to face Sunset. Wordlessly, he charged at her.

Sunset responded to his advance with more fire, a constant stream of flame spewing from her horn. Kirby, displaying his frankly absurd agility for his shape and stature, managed to dodge around the entire attack. Once he was within striking distance, Sunset’s eyes widened as he tried to take a swing at her.

Thankfully, a violet shield sprang into existence before his strike connected, his spear clattering off it and sending him stumbling. Sunset took full advantage, summoning a fireball and sending it careening into Kirby at full force, launching him nearly to the other side of the ring. She nodded at Twilight in thanks, who beamed back at her.

Kirby, though, recovered easily enough, back on his feet only moments later. As he refocused on Twilight’s shields again, Sunset considered her options. Clearly, fire wasn’t going to cut it, just like in their last bout. Her cryokinetic spells fared generally better against him, and with Twilight here to help, perhaps they’d actually be enough to win this time.

Thankfully, her earlier pyrokinesis had left large amounts of water vapor in the air, which were trivial to begin to cool. The ambient temperature sharply dropped, and Kirby’s eyes widened as he let out an involuntary shiver. He twirled out of the way just before a pillar of ice dropped from the ceiling, piercing straight through the boxing ring right where he had previously been. Sharp icicle spears branched off from the main pillar as frost began coating the ring’s ropes.

Kirby, apparently eager to cut off the magic at the source, rushed after Sunset once again, but this time she was prepared. Wrenching one of the icicles from its source with her telekinesis, she personally blocked his attack with it. The pair engaged in a spear fight, but Kirby was constantly able to keep her on the back hoof. Regardless of how many strikes she parried, he constantly kept on the offensive until eventually, something had to give.

Unfortunately for Sunset, the thing that gave was her makeshift weapon. Ice is hardly an effective material to build weapons out of, given both its low melting point and its brittleness. After having sustained enough damage from Kirby whaling on it with his spear, the icicle finally gave out after he drew back his arm and punched straight through it. The strike continued forward as well, directly towards Sunset, but she grinned as Twilight quickly erected another set of shields around her.

Her grin dropped as Kirby slid to a stop, though. Instead of completing his punch, he instead quickly turned and threw his spear at the now sorely underdefended Twilight, a significant proportion of her shields having been repurposed to defend Sunset. Twilight gasped, and Sunset could do nothing but watch in horror, her mouth agape, as the projectile smashed through weakened shield after weakened shield in its destructive path towards the princess. Even Kirby seemed surprised and perhaps a bit distraught, as if he hadn’t expected to throw it with so much strength.

Before the spear could complete its violent trajectory, however, a ball of green fire interrupted it, incinerating it in its entirety. Sunset turned to stare at its source: the young purple dragon currently trying to force his way into the ring. Spike, after launching the fireball, had managed to get himself tangled up in the ring’s ropes. It took him a few moments of struggling, but he eventually freed himself and was unceremoniously dumped onto the boxing ring’s floor.

He picked himself back up, though, and dusted himself off. Clearing his throat, he declared, “I won’t let you hurt them!”

“SPIKE?” Twilight shouted after getting over her shock. “I told you to stay in the room!”

“I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing!” he retorted.

Kirby blinked as his headband disintegrated, and looked between the two arguing siblings confusedly. He gestured at them and looked to Sunset.

“Yeah, I don’t really know either,” she said.

Kirby shrugged, and Sunset’s eyes widened in surprise as he suddenly resumed the fight, lashing out at her with a punch. She barely managed to teleport away in time, Kirby’s strike whiffing through empty air.

She reappeared right between Twilight and Spike. “Sorry to break this up, but we’ve got a bigger problem to deal with!”

All of them turned towards Kirby, who was already rushing forward.

“Spike, get behind me,” Twilight ordered.

“But I want to help!” Spike protested.

“Whatever you choose, do it fast!” Sunset added, flaring her horn and summoning an iceball. She hurled it at the rapidly-approaching puffball, but he apparently remembered its effects. He leapt up to dodge it, completely avoiding the iced-over floor and even puffing himself up a few times to float. At this point, really, Sunset was done with questioning how he did it and just more concerned with the fact that he was now above them.

Kirby let himself exhale, plummeting towards the three with his arm outstretched for a punch. Twilight started desperately summoning shields, but it wasn’t nearly enough. With how haphazardly and quickly she was erecting them, the shields were far weaker than her usual fare. Kirby smashed through shield after shield with relative ease, but was knocked off-course just before he reached his targets by another bout of fire breath from Spike. Instead, he impacted the boxing ring’s floor, forming another large hole in it.

Sunset, at this point desperate to just keep him contained now that they had an ever-so-slight reprieve, looked around for anything she could use to her advantage. With a grunt, she once again lit her horn and telekinetically ripped the ring’s posts from their positions, attempting to use the ropes to tie Kirby down.

Unfortunately, Kirby had recovered fast enough to react, and opened his mouth. A massive suction took hold, ripping away Sunset’s grip of the ropes and letting Kirby completely inhale the massive projectile. His cheeks puffed up, he turned to Twilight and spat the ropes right at her at an impressive speed.

Both Twilight and Sunset focused their telekinetic fields on the projectile, slowing it to a stop only inches away from its target. Together, they reversed its direction as well, hurling it right back at Kirby.

He responded by opening his mouth again and beginning another inhale.

Spike narrowed his eyes. “Oh no you don't,” he said, rushing forward.

“Spike, no!” Twilight called out, but it was already too late. Spike had reached his target and, rather impressively for someone of his stature, jumped up and punched the ball of ropes and posts hard enough to knock it away from Kirby’s suction force.

He realized his own mistake only moments later.

The two ponies could only watch in horror as Spike found himself now in Kirby’s vacuum, disappearing down the pink demon’s gullet before either could even spark their horn in an attempt to save him. For a brief moment, silence reigned as Kirby looked over himself, curious about the new claw-shaped purple hat he wore.

Sunset, at least, knew that Kirby’s inhale was nonlethal. Spike would be fine in a few minutes–if a bit disoriented. She realized half a second later, however, one very important overall detail she’d missed.

No one had told Twilight about that.

Before Sunset could even blink, there was a flash of violet light as Twilight teleported.

The wall exploded.

Something in Twilight snapped when she saw Spike vanish. She wasn’t entirely sure what, just that she had never felt so much pure, unadulterated rage for another being before. Not even Discord had gotten this sort of reaction out of her. Her thoughts were colored near-completely red, her usual cohesive, logical thought process thrown completely out the window. There was a small voice in the back of her head still hypothesizing, contemplating that her reaction was a defense mechanism to prevent her from clamming up in a dangerous situation. Overall, though, it was drowned out by her utter fury. This pink monster had just eaten her little brother. He needed to pay. Dearly.

So one can’t really fault her for her immediate reaction of teleporting beside Kirby, summoning a large amount of earth pony magic, and punching him hard enough to send him directly through the exterior wall.

She immediately switched to using a combination of pegasus and unicorn magic, blasting away most of the rest of the wall and launching after him at near-supersonic speeds. She caught up to the stunned but still very much conscious puffball mere moments later in the skies above Mount Dedede, and blasted him straight towards one of the other peaks.

Before he hit the ground, though, Kirby managed to recover and tested out one of the abilities that inhaling Spike had given him. Great wings of purple flame sprouted from his back, launching him back skyward. Quickly getting back in range of Twilight, he shot a stream of fire at her.

His attempt went nowhere, however, as he was suddenly buffeted by hurricane-force crosswinds, interrupting his attack and sending him careening off-course. Twilight followed up by teleporting directly above him and flapping her wings hard, unconsciously summoning large amounts of pegasus magic to form a massive downdraft. Kirby, though, rolled with the wind, flaring out his fiery wings again and swooping out of his dive just above the craggy ground. He gracefully soared back upward, dodging rapidfire blasts of arcane might from Twilight in the process.

Once he reached the same altitude as her, he changed up his strategy. Instead of going for a ranged attack, Kirby wrapped himself in fire and slammed forward as a fireball, hoping to catch Twilight off-guard.

Unfortunately for him, Twilight simply teleported again, this time above him as he began to slow. Unable to dodge, she hit him with a massive beam of pure magic, sending him crashing into one of the neighboring mountains in a plume of dust.

“Oh shit,” Sunset swore as she realized the damage that had been done to the room. Beyond the now completely irreparable boxing ring, the exterior wall had been nearly entirely demolished. Her eyes widened as she heard the ceiling start to creak dangerously.

“Oh fuck!” she swore again, flaring her horn and casting as large a shield as she could just under the ceiling, hoping to at least partially replace any load-bearing force the wall had had.

“By the stars, getting inhaled is never pleasant,” she heard Bandee mumble as he entered the room. “Are you guys alright…” he trailed off, staring dumbfounded at the state of affairs.

Sunset cringed as a flash of violet lit up the sky, even overpowering the setting sun, and a mountaintop looked like it exploded. Using what little mana she could afford to spare, she conjured the communicator Meta Knight had given her. “You mind calling in some help to stop the building from collapsing?”

Twilight growled as she stared through her farsight spell. His hat had been knocked off, but that damn puff dared to keep living. Calling upon her purview as the Element of Magic–which some part of her recognized that she was fortunate to have left in her dresser today–she summoned a swirling, pulsing mass of arcane energy and hurled it downward at Kirby.

It hit the ground and exploded in only moments, but unfortunately it seemed that Kirby had seen it coming. Twilight frowned. Not only that, but he’d managed to inhale some of the very essence of magic itself in the explosion, gaining a getup that looked a bit reminiscent of Trixie’s.

Kirby, though, seemed quite a bit more powerful than a mere stage performer. A retaliatory blast of blue magic shot its way towards Twilight, forcing her to swoop out of the way. He levitated himself upward at a rapid clip, racing towards the alicorn startlingly quickly. Twilight’s attempts to use pegasus magic were nullified as well, as Kirby–rather impressively, she had to begrudgingly admit–had a fairly decent handle on atmokinesis.

Still, she had the edge in raw magical ability. His second attempt to fire a magical beam was fully countered by one of her own completely overpowering it, forcing him to give up and dodge downward, out of the way. She kept up the pressure, teleporting closer and bringing down a torrent of magic upon him.

Kirby was carried down nearly all the way to the ground again, but before he impacted it, he teleported himself to safety on another mountaintop. Twilight grit her teeth and audibly growled again. With naught but pure rage determining her decisions, she used most of her directly-available mana to summon a beam of arcane wrath. It raced downward, entirely obscuring Twilight’s view of her target with a glow of purple light. She felt a slight bit of resistance, but determined her attack a success when the mountain’s peak exploded.

Her assessment lasted all of a quarter-second before she heard Kirby teleport directly above her, and her world turned from rage to pain. She shrieked in surprise and agony as she felt her right wing break. She plummeted towards the ground as Kirby continued his assault, feeling one of the bones in her left foreleg shatter. He teleported away afterward, but the pain was still so great that Twilight was barely lucid enough to summon a cushioning charm before she hit the ground, sending up a plume of dust and forming a small crater.

There, broken, battered, and probably bleeding–she couldn’t quite tell–Twilight lay utterly defeated as her vision went black, just as the sun sank below the horizon.

Author's Note

The Loyal Servant, Bandana Waddle Dee
General Bandana Waddle Dee is Dedede's loyalest underling! His commands are second only to the King's, so he can call on all of Dedede's army!

The Lost Travelers, Sunset, Spike, and Twilight
These three beings from another world are stuck on Popstar! But they're working for Dedede. Go, Kirby, and reunite the Star Rod!

The Mistress of Magic, Princess Twilight Sparkle
Enraged by Kirby's actions, this royalty from another realm is out for blood. She's powerful, but with the magic she's throwing around, she can't last forever. Outlast her and find a way to strike back!

So this chapter ends on a bit of a downer, I suppose. I originally was going to include Adventure's aftermath in this chapter, but this is already nearing 5,000 words and I desperately needed to cut it in two, so we end right on Twilight's defeat at the hands of our pink puffball of destruction. Not to worry though; with a maxim tomato, a few hours' rest, and Spike returning, she'll be right as rain soon enough.

Also, I want to quickly mention my choice to include Dragon Fire as the copy ability Kirby gets from Spike, not just Fire. In my original draft of this chapter, I went with Fire as the ability, but I realized that a massive battle in the sky backdropped by a sunset was far more climactic. Thus, I reasoned that the upgraded abilities shouldn't necessarily be limited to Forgotten Land. Some would, for obvious reasons, not make early appearances (like Morpho Sword), but if Kirby inhales a powerful enough enemy, I may handwave in an upgraded ability for consistency's (and Rule of Cool's) sake.

Oh, and I couldn't find an extended version of Adventure's miniboss music on YouTube, though not for lack of trying. If you're on browser, you can right click the video and loop it manually. On mobile, though, I'm not sure if something similar is possible.

Chapter XXVIII: Ocean Blue

Flying to Ripple Field turned out to be quite a bit faster than walking to Big Forest had been. Twilight supposed that that did check out–flying was leagues faster than walking, after all–but the actual distance seemed shorter as well.

Not that that mattered, of course, but it was an intriguing thought nonetheless.

As they touched down on the nearest sandbar to them, the alicorn took the time to note their surroundings. Ripple Field, just as she had seen from further back, was less a single island and more a collection of small, sandy beaches barely above sea level. The largest of the islands couldn’t have been more than a few hundred meters across, barely enough for some grasses and a few palm trees to have sprung up on it. Twilight could even see a few Popstarian animals on it as well, a Bugzzy and two Bonkers.

They didn’t look like they cared much about the growing storm.

Looking around more, she noted that their surroundings were so flat she could see all the way to the next island: Iceberg. She wasn’t the only one looking that way, though.

“So, why don’t we just fly all the way to Dark Castle?” Dedede asked. “We could probably get there faster than Spike.”

For a moment, Twilight did think about that, before she shook her head. “I’m not great at flying as it is,” she explained, “so I want to keep it to a minimum. Plus-” She was cut off by a strong gust of wind, which whipped her mane around and almost blew off Dedede’s cap. She spat out the parts of her mane that’d blown into her mouth and made a mental note to get a manecut soon. “There’s that.”

Bandee’s bandana flapped in the wind, but was secure enough on his head that he didn’t need to actively keep it on. “Fair enough,” he acknowledged.

“So, we just island hop our way on over ‘till we get closer to Iceberg?” Rick surmised.

“Pretty much,” Twilight agreed. She winced as a particularly large wave hit the sandbar, the water nearly reaching all the way to them. “We might want to move quickly, though. I don’t know how much longer this’ll be above water.”

Coo gave out an indignant squawk as another gust almost blew him out of the air. “With this blasted wind I’m not sure how long I’ll be above water!” Flapping a bit to stabilize himself, he perched atop Rick’s head. “I do hope you don’t mind this too terribly, Rick.”

“Nah, it’s all good, mate,” Rick smiled.

Twilight nodded at the two of them and resumed leading their journey forward, a small smile gracing her face as it began drizzling. Even with the weight of the world on their shoulders, even with the direness of the situation, and even with it probably not mattering in the end, they were able to stay confident and happy.

She blinked. That had been a strangely nihilistic thought. She’d taken the destruction of another Bridge better than she’d thought she would.

Bandana Dee, though, had not taken it nearly as well. He sat down as soon as the wave of apathy hit them, planting his spear in the ground and sighing deeply. “What’s the point?” he asked. “Who knows how powerful this thing’s gotten! What chance do we have?”

Dedede tossed his hammer from hand to hand. “Chin up, Bandee! We’ve got more of a chance than you’d think!”

Bandana Dee blinked at his king. “Easy for you to say,” he countered, gesturing to his hammer. “You’ve fought Kirby nearly to a standstill, and he punched a wing off of the Halberd! And I’ve seen Twilight do some insane stuff with her magic, but I’m just a Waddle Dee with a spear. What am I even worth to you all in a fight like this?”

Before he could come up with anything else self-depreciating, though, Kirby tackled him in a hug. “You’re a friend!” he asserted.

“And friends are always worth it,” Twilight agreed.

Gooey didn’t say anything, but it bounced over and nuzzled Bandee regardless.

The General sniffled a bit, but when he looked up, even with him not having a mouth, Twilight could tell that he was smiling. “Thanks, guys.”

All-in-all, Twilight thought it was quite a sweet moment.

A sweet moment that was rather undercut by Rick’s cry of “Oh shit!”

A massive wave, far taller than what had been crashing ashore so far, washed entirely over both Rick and Coo. When it receded, the pair had vanished.

Immediately, Kirby dove into the water after them, Gooey not far behind. The three left on shore, suddenly extremely tense, stood back-to-back, their weapons raised (or horn lit, in Twilight’s case). It didn’t help.

Another large wave, this one from the opposite side of the sandbar and defying everything Twilight thought she knew about fluid dynamics, rose up. A giant blue sunfish, with fins of yellow and eyes black as coal, leapt from the water and slapped Dedede in the face. The king, caught off-guard, stumbled forward into the wave and was washed away with the attacking fish.

“Your Majesty!” Bandee cried out, but was helpless to do anything.

Twilight felt something wet and cold wrap around her leg, and she faintly realized that the storm had raised the water level around them. Enough so that an Elieel could wrap its powerful tail around her leg and pull.

Bandee, in an attempt to at least save her, grabbed onto one of her other legs. All that resulted in was the both of them getting pulled under and vanishing into the surf. The only sign that a scuffle had even taken place, the disturbance in the sand, was washed away by the waves only moments later.

The creatures on the large island hadn’t even looked up at the sounds.

As soon as the water closed over Twilight’s head, her mind melted into a state of panic. The Elieel had pulled her far enough out that she was caught in a riptide and sent spiraling, losing her sense of direction. She couldn’t tell which way was up, and her instinctive kicking was only sending her into more of an underwater tailspin.

Honestly, it was a miracle that she’d remembered to keep her mouth closed.

Not that it would matter, in the end. She’d expended so much energy in her senseless flailing that her lungs were burning in protest, demanding their supply of life-giving air. She was sure that she’d pass out soon if she continued to not breathe, and even though alicorns could survive for a limited time in an oxygen-free environment, that only really applied to standard conditions. Despite her enhanced physiology, she very much could still drown; mana metabolism or no, the mechanical factors of water flooding her lungs would kill her outright.

It was that point that her panicked mind finally remembered that it had magic to work with, but by then it was already too late. Darkness had begun closing in at the edges of her vision, and for a brief moment she consigned herself to her fate. It was pathetic, really, she thought. A Princess of Equestria, drowned on an alien world by, of all things, an eel.

An eel that…wasn’t holding on, anymore?

Bandee had fought it off?

Underwater?

With a spear?

The absurdity of it stalled her panic just enough for the rational part of her mind to reassert itself, and she immediately took a deep breath. The water promptly failed to flow into her mouth, but her lungs still seemed to fill with air. As the beginnings of hypoxia began to fade, she fully recalled what Sunset had mentioned about her time on Aquarius.

“Oh yeah, water’s breathable here, by the way.”

“WHAT?”

“Yeah, I just jumped in, took a breath, and didn’t die, so y’know…”

She still thought it absurd, but then again, with how wacky this universe was she wasn’t exactly surprised. Compared to the instantly healing food, the planet-sized behemoth machines, and the spirit of darkness that had possessed her brother, what was inexplicably breathable water?

“You okay over there?” Bandee asked as the Elieel retreated and Twilight’s breathing calmed. There wasn’t any hint of distortion from the water in his voice.

Oh how Twilight yearned to study that. The physics of this universe was so similar and yet so tantalizingly different to what she knew. If only she’d the time to do so, but the list of things she wanted to study in this world was growing far faster than her capability to exhaust it–or even to narrow it down to what studies would be useful for getting back to Equestria. And as of current, saving the world took priority anyway.

Both because she wouldn’t even be able to get back home in the first place if the world ended, and because she wouldn’t be able to live with herself otherwise, knowing she could have made a difference and just didn’t.

Her mental tangent, somewhat ironically, had wound up slightly distracting her from the moment at hoof. Bandee swam over and tapped her on the shoulder, repeating his question. “You good, Twilight?”

Twilight blinked in surprise. “Oh, sorry. Yeah, I’m…alright. Just a bit panicked.”

“First time underwater on Popstar?” Bandee asked.

Twilight nodded. “It just takes some getting used to. If I tried this back home I’d be very dead, so it’s easy for the panic to set in.”

Bandana Dee nodded in understanding. “So, what’s the plan?” he asked, looking around. “Find the others, get back to the surface, and take off for Iceberg?”

Twilight looked up at the surface–taking the time to calm down and reorient herself had gotten her her sense of direction back. It was pretty dark, what with the storm blocking a lot of sunlight, but she could still make out the distortions caused by the roiling surface. “Regrouping with the others and getting back to the surface, yeah,” she agreed, “but I’m not so sure about being able to fly to Iceberg.”

“Why not?” Bandee asked. “I mean, I get if it’s the wind, but you didn’t seem particularly bothered by it before.”

Twilight flared out a wing, inadvertently launching herself half a meter backwards. She hadn’t gone swimming since her ascension, so doing so with two extra limbs was going to take some work, it seemed. “My wings aren’t waterproof,” she explained. “I’m not going to be able to fly until they dry out.”

The feeling of her wings being totally waterlogged was honestly rather disconcerting. Even underwater, she felt somehow more sluggish, and they were going to be a pain to dry out later. Sure, she could flash dry them with magic, but doing it that way would leave her feathers an absolute mess and she’d have to take the time to preen them. Doing so with her magic was faster than how a pegasus would preen their wings, but it still took significant effort and was, quite frankly, annoying.

Bandee looked around in the murky water. “So, for now I guess we’ll just look for the others?” He gestured broadly with his spear. “That’s a lot of water to search through.”

Twilight shrugged. “I might be able to do something with my magic to help, but to save energy it might be a better idea to just wing it.”

Bandee suppressed a snicker, and Twilight sighed. “I swear that was unintentional.”

“Don’t worry, Princess,” Bandee said, and somehow Twilight could tell that he was smirking. “I’m sure time will just fly by while we search.”

Twilight facehoofed, which was a surprisingly difficult motion while underwater. “You know, I wonder how the others are doing?” she asked, very deliberately changing the subject.

By the time Kirby and Gooey had dove into the water, Rick and Coo had already vanished from view. That was unfortunate, but Kirby had been in underwater situations lots before! He was sure that he could find them lickety-split! Especially with Gooey along to help!

Sure, Gooey was mostly just smiling broadly and following along, but that just meant it was invested!

The water here was a lot deeper than Kirby had expected, though. The ground they had come from, sandy only at the top, was the tip of a massive underwater cliff. Below water, the cliff face was stony, but worn smooth from the water. All except for one portion of it a bit of the way down.

It was a tunnel! Kirby loved underwater tunnels–they were so much fun to explore!

Excitedly, he swam into it. The further he went, though, the more he realized that this was no natural underwater cave. There were all sorts of pipes in the walls, forcing the current of the tunnel every which way! Kirby and Gooey even nearly hit the wall a couple times as they were forced around!

They didn’t face much trouble in the tunnel itself, though. Only a few Blippers and a Squishy or two were in the water itself, and a couple of Elieels liked to duck in and out of the pipes. It was nothing that the two of them couldn’t handle!

Eventually, they reached the end of the tunnel. The current had forced them all the way here, into what looked like a control room. Near one of the panels, there was another creature floating in the water with a tentacle reached out. As they watched, a bolt of electricity struck out from the panel, absorbing itself into the yellow creature.

Then it turned to look at them, and sent a jolt of electrified water at Kirby.

He dodged out of the way easily enough, but his current copy ability wasn’t helping him very much. When he did eventually make his way down to the floor, the claws just couldn’t cut through the steel plating!

Thankfully, Kirby wound up not needing to do anything in this fight! Gooey had rushed forward at the Squishy-like creature while it was distracted firing at Kirby, bodily slamming into it. It tried to retaliate with another electric jolt, but Gooey fired its laser and pushed the creature into the wall, stunning it. Then, reaching out with its long tongue, Gooey grabbed a tentacle and slammed the creature into a control panel, knocking it out.

Curiously, though, Gooey’s look had changed when it did! It turned yellowish, and when it flicked its tongue a spark jolted off of it! Kirby gasped in realization and quickly swam up to Gooey, wrapping it up in a hug. His new friend was like him!

Gooey didn’t realize why it was being hugged, of course, but it appreciated it nonetheless. As soon as Kirby broke the embrace, it fired off a bolt of electricity, impacting another control panel and frying it.

With a shudder, the entire facility shut down. The current outside of the control room slowed, allowing Kirby and Gooey safe passage out of the tunnel.

No one in the Rainbow Islands felt it, the entire area having been submerged in the emotional pits of apathy, but the rest of the planet suddenly found itself a bit lighter-hearted and the world not feeling so hopeless anymore. It wasn’t much, but it was noticeable.

The facility in Ripple Field shutting down had allowed the Fountain of Dreams to reallocate some of its power away from the destroyed machinery that its creators had left running in their haste. That had been a constant drain on its Dreamwater output for millenia, but with it gone, it could pick up just a bit more slack from the destroyed Rainbow Bridges.

Of course, none of Popstar’s residents actually knew why they felt better, just that the crushing feeling of existential dread had lifted a bit. Enough for a Broom Hatter to pick himself up off the ground, dust himself off, and resume his trek towards Orange Ocean. He couldn’t let himself forget the importance of his mission! King Dedede had ordered it!

“Now what did you go and do that for?” Coo angrily asked.

Rick, upon getting hit with the wave, had instinctively turned himself to stone with Coo still perched upon him. And the owl had instinctively tightened his grip, latching onto Rick’s stony fur. Unfortunately, with the wave washing them over an underwater cliff, the two had sunk like, well, a rock.

They hit the bottom not long after getting washed away, a cloud of sand kicking up when they landed. Their descent had been slowed a bit by Coo not exactly being hydrodynamic, but they’d fallen the full fifty or so meters in under half a minute. And with the storm overhead blocking sunlight, it was dark down there–the two could barely even see each other.

“Don’t worry, mate!” Rick said. “We can just swim back up–it’ll be a piece of piss!”

“I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I am a ruddy owl,” Coo shot back. “I’ve got no bloody way to easily swim!”

To emphasize, he flapped his wings, which did just about nothing to help him ascend.

Rick frowned. “We might be here for a bit, then. Guess we’re waitin’ for the others!”

Coo settled down, perching on Rick’s head again. “Well, at least you plummeting us down kept us from moving far horizontally. Perhaps they’ll be able to help us up soon.”

“Stars, I hope so!” Rick said. “If we don’t fix the whole apathy problem soon, Pick might actually kill me when I get back to Grass Land!”

“Partner?” Coo asked.

Rick nodded, which translated to Coo getting swung around a bit from his perch. “Pick’s my girlfriend,” he explained. “I’d like to say that I’m on this adventure for her, but,” he chuckled, “to be honest, the whole darkness possessing people thing is right terrifying on its own.”

“True enough, mate,” Coo agreed.

“So what about ya?” Rick asked. “Ya got anyone waitin’ for ya back home?”

“Nah, mate,” Coo answered. “The single life’s for me.”

Rick shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

The two sat in silence for a few moments before Rick came up with an idea. “Hey, ya know what?” he said. “Ya made those cutter blades outta air up in Big Forest, right?”

“It’s a bit tough, but yes, I can do that,” Coo replied.

“So couldya make it outta water?”

Coo considered that for a moment before deciding to just go for it. He lifted himself off of Rick’s head, pointed a talon at the rocky cliff, and tried to fire off a cutter blade.

Somewhat surprisingly, it did actually form–at least, sort of. The end result could only generously be called a cutter blade and was more just a slight pressure wave, but, importantly, it pushed Coo backwards.

Significantly.

Rick grinned. “I think we’ve got our ticket outta here!”

There was a sort of growling sound near them, and a light suddenly appeared in the murky depths. An anglerfish of sorts was staring them down, and very suddenly the pair were quite thankful that Coo had figured out how to swim quickly.

“Coo,” Rick said, “I think we might wanna get outta here. Now.”

The anglerfish waved its lure and electrified a column of water near them, sending Rick’s fur standing on end.

“Much obliged, old chap,” Coo agreed, and the two took off as quickly as they could.

“Watch it, ya stinking fish!” Dedede shouted, pushing the blue sunfish off of him. It had been a bit of a struggle immediately after he wound up in the water, but only for a few seconds. He was a penguin after all–he was just as much at home underwater as he was on land!

Of course, this fish was arguably far more at home underwater, given that it was a fish. It was swimming right back at him with a vengeance, its black eyes narrowed with focus. Dedede reacted quickly, summoning his hammer and slamming it into the fish’s side as it approached.

It tumbled fin over fin, but reorientated itself in mere moments, glaring at Dedede.

The king raised his arm in a “come at me” gesture.

Not having many other ways to attack, the fish rocketed forward again, but when Dedede swung, it suddenly encased itself in a block of ice. His hammer broke through, but it gave the fish enough time to twist itself around and deliver a tail slap right to Dedede’s face.

Now Dedede was sent spiraling, and the fish pressed its advantage. It swam forward again, but the king’s wild flailing managed to slam a hammer strike directly into its bottom. The two tumbled away from each other, but Dedede got his bearings back first. He swam down, getting underneath the fish before it managed to stop spinning.

Dedede raised his hammer, but it seemed that the fish had seen it coming. It froze itself in a block of ice again, but when this one shattered, Dedede suddenly felt an absolute chill. Looking down, he saw that his left arm was becoming coated in a thickening layer of frost, and he broke off the engagement before it could get any worse.

The fish pursued him, freezing the water around it into sharpened spear-like structures that it batted at Dedede with its dorsal fin. He batted away the first two with his hammer, but the fish launched the next four ice spikes simultaneously. They were spread out enough that there was no way for him to dodge them fast enough, and hitting all four with his hammer was out of the question!

Thankfully, he didn’t have to. One of the spikes he managed to bat away, sure, but another was impacted mid-launch by a spear, and the other two were demolished by a beam of purple light!

“Your Majesty!” Bandana Dee shouted, and Dedede grinned. “You looked like you could use some help.”

“I had it handled!” Dedede shouted back, launching forward and slamming his hammer into the fish as Bandee swam to retrieve his thrown spear. Twilight added one of her own spells, forcing the fish closer to her as she hydrokinetically moved the water around it. Her tiara began glowing brightly, and the fish squirmed as it tried to escape the pull of the current.

Its efforts were in vain, and the darkness in its eyes receded from black to a mere dark blue. Just like with Coo, a small sphere of darkness was forced out of it, which the Element of Magic promptly destroyed with prejudice.

The fish blinked a few times before swimming in a circle, slowly inspecting itself. “Well, looks like everythin’s accounted for!” He turned to the group. “So, youse are the ones who saved me from dat parasite? I’ve gotta thank youse for dat, it had me flounderin’.”

Dedede laughed. “We’re getting that a lot, today.”

Twilight nodded in agreement. “I’m sorry we had to hit you a few times, but so far I’ve only had the Element of Magic expel that darkness thing if the target’s stationary.”

The fish waved a fin dismissively. “Eh, fuhgeddaboudit,” he said. “Da name’s Kine, and if I had a hand to shake, I would!”

Bandee, having collected his spear, waved. “I’m Bandana Waddle Dee!” He pointed at Dedede. “This is King Dedede, and,” he pointed at Twilight, “Princess Twilight Sparkle!”

“We’re sorry if this whole thing is inconvenient,” Twilight diplomatically mentioned. “Something’s been destroying the Rainbow Bridges, so the whole world has been losing its emotion.”

Kine frowned, a strange look on a fish. “Well, if everyone’s emotions’re gettin’ stunted, goin’ back ta see da Boss ain’t gonna help things.”

“The boss?” Bandee asked.

“My wife, Mine,” Kine answered. “Whatever dat parasite was, when it hit me Mine just couldn’t bring herself ta care, it felt.”

Twilight nodded. “That does seem to be the default way people react to the waves of apathy. Either anger or losing emotion altogether.” She shuddered. “It’s…creepy is putting it lightly.”

“So, have you lot found the others yet?” Dedede asked.

Bandee shook his head. “You were the first we found.”

“Got some people missin’?” Kine asked.

“There are four more of us,” Twilight explained. “We all got separated on the surface, and they went in the opposite direction on the sandbar.”

“Well, if youse need ta get ‘round da cliff ta see youse’s groupers, I’m your fish!” Kine declared. He offered his tail for the others to grab onto. “We’ll be goin’ fast enough ta make a swordfish jealous!”

“Does anypony else find it slightly…concerning that Fluttershy’s mood flips on a dime, watching this?” Rarity asked.

The mare in question was currently enraptured with the view on screen, immersed in trying to figure out how a fish could talk. Mere moments before, though, she had been cowering behind Discord. “He doesn’t even have gills!” she realized, seemingly not even hearing Rarity.

“Water is breathable there,” Cadance pointed out. “Maybe the fish there don’t need them.”

Fluttershy gasped. “So if they have lungs, maybe they can breathe on land, too!”

“Yeah, Ah see what ya mean,” Applejack said.

“I can hear you all,” Fluttershy suddenly said, only slightly louder than a whisper, and Applejack and Rarity blushed in embarrassment. “I just don’t like watching the fights. The cute little animals all get hurt during them!”

“Cute?” Rainbow asked.

Fluttershy nodded. “You might not find them all cute, but the natural world has such beauty to it! Like those pig creatures from Big Forest! You can tell so much about them just from looking! They both definitely foraged for food by digging, but the larger one’s tusks looked like they could be used for competition for mates, too!”

Rarity cleared her through. “I do think you’ve made your point, darling.”

Fluttershy clammed up a bit. “Oh, um, right. Sorry.”

“Oh, there’s no need to apologize for what you’re passionate about!” Rarity retorted. “I should be apologizing for being so presumptuous!”

Applejack looked between them before she gestured to Rarity. “What she said.”

Kirby and Gooey, at least, were easy to locate. They were visible almost as soon as the group rounded the corner of the sandbar, exiting a tunnel of some sort. This side of the sandbar was significantly deeper than the side they’d just come from, so Twilight figured that the two of them had been underneath them while the fight with Kine was going on.

Gooey did look a bit strange, though. It definitely hadn’t used to be yellow.

Kirby excitedly waved at them, and Kine brought them down. “Gooey copied!” he jovially reported.

Dedede paled and Bandee seemed shaken. “Gooey…what?”

Instead of answering, Gooey flicked its tongue. An electrical spark flew off of it, discharging into the water.

“There’s two of them?” Dedede shouted, almost in despair.

That got him a weird look from Twilight and a weirder look from Bandee, given that he and Kirby were currently allies.

Kirby, of course, didn’t care and was focused on Kine. “Hi new friend!” he greeted. “I’m Kirby!”

“Nice ta meetcha!” Kine said back. “Da name’s Kine, but my friends…also call me Kine.”

Screams from below them distracted from further introductions, though. Everyone looked down, eyes widening in surprise as Coo and Rick shot past with a shout of “SWIM FOR YOUR LIVES!”

“By the stars, it’s da Sweet Stuff!” Kine shouted. He created some icicle spears out of the water and launched them. “Everyone move!”

The ice barely slowed down the anglerfish after them as it tore through. It launched a bolt of electricity at them, which sent Twilight’s fur standing on end and she just barely managed to redirect around them with a conductive shield. She sent a magical beam down as well, which did manage to significantly delay it.

Which was good for her, because she was by far the slowest swimmer of the group.

“Grab on!” Kine called at her as he slowed down to help.

“Thanks!” Twilight called back, grabbing ahold of his tail and keeping an eye on the fish below them. “Left!” she shouted.

Kine didn’t ask why, he just veered left. The lightning bolt soared past them, and Twilight cringed as it hit Gooey, who had been directly in front of them. Thankfully, it didn’t seem to affect it much, and it turned around to fire a dark laser of its own before their flight continued.

“What’s the plan, here?” Bandee shouted from his position of clinging to Dedede’s back.

Kirby, who had been struggling to keep up with their swimming as well, suddenly found himself halfway in Kine’s mouth as the fish helped him speed up.

“Get to the surface!” Twilight shouted back. “I can’t fly like this, but I can levitate us all above the surface a bit. Hopefully it’ll leave!”

“Crikey, it’s gainin’ on us!” Rick shouted.

“We’re almost there!” Dedede called. “Just a bit longer and we’ve got this!”

Twilight cast another conductive shield as the anglerfish sent out another bolt of lightning, this time aiming to send the electricity right back into the fish. It didn’t quite work–the anglerfish just moved out of the way a bit–but it still delayed it long enough for them to reach the surface.

Dedede was the first to breach, having been moving fast enough to get a solid meter out of the water. Coo was next, though he just surfaced normally. Rick, Gooey, and Kine (with Twilight and Kirby in tow) surfaced just afterward, Kine spitting Kirby out and into the air. Twilight’s horn flared with power as she focused on levitating everyone that couldn’t fly on their own, and she grunted with the effort.

She really should have focused more on autolevitation as a unicorn.

It took far more effort than usual–mostly because she had to focus on everyone as an individual object, rather than clumping them all up into a big ball like she had done for the Meta-Knights–but it was doable. Everyone was hovering around two meters above the surface, rain lashing at them and the waves sometimes getting nearly high enough to reach them. But the anglerfish was stuck, and after thirty exhausting seconds, a single fired lighting bolt, and Coo hitting it with no less than five cutter blades formed from the air, it retreated back to the depths.

Twilight kept them in the air for another fifteen before letting them all crash back down into the surf. “I don’t know how Rarity does it,” she eventually said as they all caught their breath. “I can put a lot of power into my telekinesis, but I still need to work on fine control, clearly.”

“Seemed good enough,” Dedede said.

“Yeah, but…” Twilight gestured up at the rain. “Even if I could dry my wings out easily, the rain is strong enough now that I can’t fly.”

“I’m in the same boat,” Coo admitted, raising a wing up above the surf. “These ol’ things just don’t do well after a bath, I’m afraid.”

“Well, where do youse need to go?” Kine asked. “I’m more dan willin’ ta help youse get wherever.”

“Iceberg,” Bandee answered immediately.

“We can swim,” Dedede pointed out. “Why don’t we just skip the wait, again?”

There was the rumble of thunder in the distance.

“That,” Twilight answered, “is why. We don’t want to be in the water when lightning strikes.”

“Fair enough,” Dedede conceded.

“Let’s get moving now, then, mates!” Rick pointed out.

Kine readied himself with a nod. “Grab on, everyone! Next stop: Iceberg.”

Author's Note

Kine, the Possessed Fish
This ocean sunfish has been possessed by a fragment of Darkness! But it's still a fish, so fighting it is straightforward: an all-out attack!

Sweet Stuff, Anglerfish Supreme
Sweet Stuff is the terror of the deep, the anglerfish that even the Boss of Ripple Field is scared of. It can shoot lightning from its lure, a devastating attack underwater!

Ripple Field is complete, but the Darkness only has one Bridge left to destroy before it's left to its own devices to do what it pleases with Spike. Hopefully our dragon friend can fight it a bit!

Of course, one does have to wonder what's been holding it up so far. :)

Ah, but that is for later. For now, our heroes have conquered three of the seven Rainbow Islands. There are four to go, and up next will be Iceberg in chapter twenty-nine: Indigo Ice.