Brooke gave our character sheets back to us after looking over them for a bit. “Everything looks good. Now that Inova’s not being teleported away, we can finally begin the new campaign.”

“You would not believe the tantrums Flurry threw,” I said. “I wasn’t there, but mom was putting chunks of ceiling back in place when I got home last Thursday.”

“Yeesh. So, to refresh everypony, you’re playing as the villains, and your goal is to accomplish your diabolical evil plans. You can’t directly kill or attack each other, but you can sabotage, trick, and inconvenience each other. You don’t have to keep your plans secret, but it may help. I will play the heroes that are out to stop you.”

Seven shady looking characters left a tavern. They’d formed an agreement over drinks and one of them, a man known simply as Joker, had managed to convince a wealthy and snooty lady to pay the group’s tab. With the way she had been berating the staff, throwing things around, and just being a nuisance, there was no disagreement from his new acquaintances. The fact that all the other open tabs and bills had gotten foisted onto her as well made it all the better, and would likely destroy or badly damage her fortune, which would put all those employed by her fortune out of work. It was villainy and karma at its finest.

“I say we go west,” a heavily muscled man in heavily built dark armor suggested. What Gargant lacked in eloquence, he more than made up for in raw strength.

Calamity, a multi-elemental woman, pointed a different way. “How about south? I heard there’s a good size town there.”

“That means lots of people,” the necromancer Kurana said as she leaned on her staff. Despite her lively tone, she was actually quite dead on the outside.

“But there’s some nobility to the west,” Echo, mistress of sound, pointed out.

“And that means fortunes to destroy,” Joker pointed out with a sinister tone.

Lupus, master of wolves, gave the options some thought. The potential in both areas was quite tempting. “What do you think, Tzentacles?”

Tzentacles, a psychic woman who always floated around and had tentacles hidden under her flowing robes, was busy. She took the 8 out of the tavern’s nicely made address numbers, turned it over, and put it back in upside down. “And that’s step 1 of my plan done.”

Echo made up her mind. “You know what, south sounds good. It’s probably an easier target anyways.”

“We ride.” Lupus summoned some giant spectral wolves, and soon, the seven were riding out to cause chaos. The wolf master made sure that, while his wolf gave him a smooth and comfortable ride, the rest would be a bit rougher on their passengers. For five of them, the rough ride would deal some minor emotional damage. Gargant was unaffected, as his sheer bulk made the wolf unable to give him a rough ride.

The seven came to the town, and were promptly greeted by the town guards. “Halt, citizens!” The leader called out as he took point. “What brings you to our town?”

“Why do you ask?” Kurana innocently asked.

“There’s been more visitors than usual recently, and not all of them had the best of intentions.”

Gargant got off his wolf and walked up to the town guards. While none of the guards were weak, he towered over them all. He made his eyes glow red, the light shining menacingly through his helmet’s visor. “Let us through.”

The leader and his guards stepped back a bit, but found some courage. “We. . . Tell us what your business is here, and we might let you through.”

Joker provided an explanation. “We’re passing through to pick up some supplies and then we’ll be on our way.” He shook a big bag of money he’d managed to swipe from a snooty woman a while ago, with her not noticing anything. “Surely you’d allow us that, right?”

The guards relaxed a little bit. “Well. . . If that’s all, I guess it’s okay.” The leader guided his fellow guards to the side to allow the seven into town.

Just as the group was about to pass by, one of the sinister seven said something. “Wait a moment!” Tzentacles got off her wolf, set a stick against a tree, and got back on. “Okay, we’re good!”

Everyone, guards and villains alike, looked at Tzentacles in confusion, wondering whether she was up to something or just being weird.

Two hours later, the seven, carrying many ill-gotten goods on their freshly saddled wolves, fled the town that they’d attacked with an undead army and set ablaze. It was chaos, mayhem, disorder, and all the things villains liked to cause.

The entirety of the town guard, more than they’d first encountered, met them at the gate. “I should have known you were lying!” The leader exclaimed.

“Ah, but I wasn’t lying,” Joker said. “We’ve picked up our supplies, now we’ll be on our way.” The bag of money from before came out, now full and close to bursting open.

“It’s not our fault you thought we were going to simply buy things,” Kurana pointed out.

“Can we just beat them and be on our way?” Calamity asked, eager flames dancing at her fingertips.

Gargant seized on that idea. He got off his wolf, walked up to the guard, and threw a single punch. The sheer amount of power from the punch sent a shockwave rippling behind the leader of the guards, stunning or knocking over those behind him.

Lupus sent Gargant’s wolf to attack some guards that weren’t stunned. The guards fought back, and the wolf made sure that the saddle and Gargant’s loaded goods were what took their attacks first.

Echo, with a bit of sound trickery, danced through the battle. Her attempts to make the guards fight each other didn’t work, since they were too focused on fighting the sinister seven to be bothered with overheard rumors. However, she was able to scatter the guards by making them hear calls about one of her fellow villains getting ready to do something.

Tzentacles managed to take three guards out of the fight by using her psychic powers to make them take out their knives and start carving a novel into the ground together. From what she saw, it was clear that spelling and grammar were not strong points for the guards, though it still looked like an interesting story.

Many flashy, high power attacks were launched at the guards. Tzentacles helped her three entranced ones survive by having them parry and deflect the incoming attacks, assisted by a psychic barrier. She would later claim that the fact that the deflected attacks hit some of her fellow villains was merely coincidence, as she had no control over where the deflections went.

Before long, the only guards left alive were Tzentacles’ three, and they were still busy carving their novel. Kurana sent some freshly revived guards to pile on the living ones and kill them.

Tzentacles looked over the mess, took a knife, and carved out one last line. “Alright, that part’s done.” She decided to take all three knives for herself.

“This seems like a good stopping point,” Brooke said as the encounter wrapped up. “So, how does everypony feel about playing the villains?”

“I thought I’d have a harder time playing a villain, but it was pretty easy,” Diamond said, a hint of caution in her voice. “Is that a bad thing?”

“Remember Solaria?” Sunflower asked.

“A healer and interrogator,” Hearthstone supplied. “And now Sunflower’s playing a cheerful necromancer. Am I the only one that finds her characters a bit ironic?”

“We all do,” Quick Quip said.

“Same time next week?” Brooke asked as I helped her pack up.

“Of course,” Girder answered for all of us.

The sinister seven stopped when they saw a woman standing in the middle of the road they were on. Some of the wolves stopped so quickly, their passengers were thrown off. Calamity, Tzentacles, and Joker landed face first on the dirt road. Echo was also thrown from her wolf, but she gracefully landed on her feet. “Do you have anything for us?” Echo asked the woman.

“You ruined everything I had,” the woman angrily said. “My wealth, my reputation, the property that had been in my family for generations, all ruined.”

Joker got to his feet. “You’ll need to narrow that down a bit.”

“You took all my money!”

Tzentacles got up and was soon levitating as usual. “You’ll need to narrow that down a bit.”

“At the tavern!”

Kurana echoed the sentiment. “That really doesn’t help.”

“We do that all the time,” Lupus explained.

“You made me pay everyone’s tabs!” The woman exclaimed.

“Ah, I remember now,” Gargant said before getting off his wolf. “You were quite annoying.”

“Ah, that one,” Kurana chimed in.

The once wealthy woman drew a sword. “I’ve had to become a mercenary just to get enough to eat, and if I have to take all of you on myself, I will.”

“I don’t think you’ll succeed.” Echo used her sound magic to create the sound of something big and hungry behind the woman.

The woman stopped and was shaking in fear. She’d seen some of the big nasty predatory creatures in her short time as a mercenary. She tried to hold firm, but her resolve wasn’t quite good enough.

Tzentacles, recognizing the sounds, used her powers to make an illusion of the monster behind the woman.

Joker made a suggestion. “Gargant, could you get her out of our way?”

“Yes.” Gargant stepped up to the woman, and she swung her sword, scratching him. In retaliation, the metal-clad mountain of muscle took the sword and tossed it aside before picking her up by the waist and flinging her far away.

Kurana tried to pick up the sword, but immediately got burned. “What the heck?”

Lupus picked up the sword with no problems. “Hmm. I think it’s enchanted against the undead.”

Joker started thinking. On one hand, a sword with such an enchantment could sell for a lot. On the other hand, it could be useful as a ward against the necromancer. Options, options, options.

As those who weren’t on a wolf got back on, Tzentacles saw a bench on the side of the path. She produced a knife, went behind it, and carved out a single triangle. “Perfect!” As she got back on her wolf, some nervous glances came her way.

One of Lupus’s wolves reported a small battalion en route to fight the sinister seven. A meeting was held, and it was decided that it would be best to deal with the attackers before they could catch the villains off guard.

The military encampment was on high alert. Their scouts and lookouts had reported that the sinister seven were on their way, and those on patrol were in groups of three. Wards and security checkpoints were set up all around to alert those inside of an intrusion.

Echo and Tzentacles were waiting just outside the patrol perimeter, hidden by Echo’s sound manipulation and Tzentacles’ illusions. Inside the bubble, Tzentacles was using one knife to carve something into the blade of another knife. The sound didn’t reach the patrol, but it was grating on Echo’s ears.

An alarm went off on the other end of the encampment, and the nearby patrols rushed off to take care of it. Echo and Tzentacles moved to find the command tent.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the camp, Gargant was swinging one soldier around like a flail by his ankles. Calamity and Kurana combined their powers to summon elemental zombies to fight the soldiers. Joker was weaving between enemy soldiers, distracting and disarming them between redirecting attacks. Lupus’s spectral wolves went further into the soldiers’ ranks, dealing small bits of damage before getting beaten.

The sneaky duo made their way to the command tent, where the field commander was watching the fight through a crystal ball. Between his focus and the concealment spells the two had going, he did not notice them. “Squad 3, flank the left side,” he ordered. “Get rid of that wolf summoner!”

Tzentacles grabbed a piece of paper and a pen from a desk and started doodling something.

Echo, with her target in front of her, moved swiftly, clapping her hands over the field commander’s ears and releasing a sonic blast that quickly turned his brain to mush.

It would have been perfectly clean, if not for Tzentacles picking up a fresh knife and using it to pin a rolled up piece of paper to his back. Echo, long used to the random acts that Tzentacles did, paid it no mind.

The two left the tent and Echo put out the signal, making the sinister seven all run from the encampment, regroup, and ride off.

A few days later, the seven would be ambushed, and before any of them could attack, heavy amounts of holy magic were used on them. Kurana was the only one affected, and soon turned to dust. The rest of the villains made short work of the mages, but the friendly necromancer was no more.

“Alright, which one of you did that?” Sunflower asked. “I highly doubt the guards could have figured out how to kill a necromancer so easily.”

“Or gotten our location,” I added.

“Yeah, how did they know where to find us?” Diamond added. “Brooke?”

“I’m not saying,” Brooke said. “But now things will get more difficult for the rest of you. Sunflower will play a hero starting next time.” She started packing things up. “I’d also like to finish this campaign before Hearth’s Warming so we can put the villainy behind us. Any objections?”

“Nope,” I said, soon chorused by the rest of my friends.

“Excellent.”

Author's Note

After two months, IT LIVES! All I needed was to wait for the natural drive to work on this story again.