Cadance sipped her tea thoughtfully and tried to look poised while sitting on top of an old beach towel that she had spread across the green mountain grass. Fluffy clouds drifted across the sky, sunlight skirting their silver-edged surfaces and coming to illuminate the bag of ketchup chips resting at her forehooves like a sleeping foal or loyal pet. It made crinkly noises when she stroked it softly, cooing to it on occasions when she thought there wasn't anypony watching.
Sombra just glared at her and sipped coffee, mumbling weather complaints between each one.
"So what's the demon topic of the day?" Cadance asked brightly, her smile white and clear in her aunt's sunlight. It also showed off a bit of ketchup chip that was stuck in her front teeth nicely.
Sombra narrowed his eyes even further. "Why don't you try rephrasing that before I even consider continuing this discussion?"
"Yes, Uncle Sombra!" Cadance chirped, quickly withdrawing a chip from the depths of the chip bag and promptly stuffing it in her face as a look of brief contemplation crossed her face. "What is the topic of the day... that just so happens to deal with demons... that we will be discussing on this visit?"
Sombra rolled his eyes at the attempt. "I suppose that's passable. Today, I put together a topic that would have been difficult to explain if you lived in any society other than this Equestria."
Cadance blinked. "This Equestria? Does that mean there were more?"
Sombra's low growl mixed with an annoyed sigh. "I see I'll need to put history lessons in our visits too, my sometimes-apprentice."
Cadance giggled into a forehoof and pointed the other at the small pile of papers that looked as though they were mostly made up of scrawled footnotes in Sombra's legible-but-rough writing. "Is that your research? What's it on?"
Though she was never nearly as bright and witty as Luna, Cadance at least was eager even if she lacked the intellectual edge that Luna and Sombra himself had. She was still nice enough company and a very amusing 'sometimes apprentice'.
"It's not on any of my usual topics since this is by far the least magic-related of all the things we've discussed."
Confusion and a bit of nervous apprehension crossed Cadance's faces. "Is it about how that one place I got pizza from didn't have pineapple as a topping option?"
"No, it isn't. Do you have any knowledge of psychology or any related fields at all?"
Stuffing her mouth with a few extra chips, Cadance smiled and bobbed her head in a nod. Her colorful mane bounced, but didn't hide her glowing horn as her magic reached for the root beer she had pushed of to the side.
"Yeppers," she said through a mouthful of chips and root beer, "I took psychology in my village's high school because I thought it would make me a better matchmaker for my friends. It, uh, didn't. Not by a long shot. I learned a lot about foals though, which certainly helped out later in Canterlot. But I've been curious about the subject since our adventures together - that and being the princess of love and all - so I've been trying to dabble on the subject with imported papers on studies, y'know?"
"Tch. You're free to admit that this nation heavily censors things because Celestia says it doesn't match 'Equestrian morals' and then brushed it under the rug at any time."
Huffing, Cadance chugged the rest of her drink as passive-aggressively as she could manage. "I get it, Sombra hates Equestria, but could we please talk about what you wrote down? I'm a bit morbidly curious on what you wrote down."
"You didn't tell me that ponies have genders."
If Cadance hadn't swallowed her soda, the both of them knew that she would have done a spit-take. "What?!"
"When I possessed Twilight and Luna and looked into the mind of Onyx, I found a part of their mind that I didn't have. It took an incredibly long time to figure out what that was, but it's something that ponies call 'gender' as if it isn't enough for them to just have a sex. When I looked into it more - I've been trying to do as much research on the matter since before our visits began, but it got pushed to the side with the amount of magic-based studies I was doing. Yet the more I looked into what a gender was, the more it was quite clear that it would be impossible for a demon to have one, or just any entity that started out in the non-physical state that I did."
Cadance nodded slowly, but the confusion in her eyes didn't vanish. "Does that mean demons are transgender?"
"No, it means we're - I - am genderless, which explains a couple of things - nothing major, but it's... well, it's certainly interesting. Why would your species even need them?"
"I've got no idea. I'm not the Princess of Genders, Sombra."
"There should be a princess of genders."
Cadance just ignored the remark - answering it would make things far more complicated even for a conversation with Sombra. "If you don't have a gender, then why do you refer to yourself as 'he'?"
"Well..." Sombra cast a quick glance at his papers. "I'm not sure if I'll be able to explain this to somepony as... equine as you. Yes, I know I'm an equine too, but you're just so obviously a pony, to keep things brief. To start: in my most simple form, I'm neither shadow nor equinoid, but a non-physical entity. The first time I was in this form is in the moment of my creation before my equinoid form was finalized. The second is when my physical body was stripped away from me and I was banished - it's part of how I was able to survive being in such a state: it wasn't unnatural for me. I can't slip into it as easily as I can my others, and I haven't figured out a way to slip into it at will. Being in that form isn't being 'reduced' to anything since it'll still be me - just different in how I function in things like communication. Using magic would be very different for me too."
"So then why do you refer to yourself as male, if you don't mind me asking again?"
Sombra looked at Cadance. "Those are two different questions, and I'll answer both for you, Chatty Niece, but don't interrupt me from here on out. Got it?"
She nodded.
"Good. As for your first question: Onyx called me male. From the very beginning of things, he kept refferring to me as 'he' and so forth. From what I could gather at the time, it was something to tell the sexes apart, which seemed simple enough. However, I never understood why you let that bleed into your society so much to the point where you would have two words for the exact same thing or address a creature by whether they were male or female. A lord and a lady are very much the same thing. From the perspective of one who loves to learn languages as I do, I can understand a few uses for this. But just as a living, breathing creature? I don't really grasp the concept that well. I refer to myself as male because I am physically male, that is all. If I needed or desired to, I could try to master very advanced magic that would be able to make my equinoid form that of a mare-"
"Sorry, sorry! I know you said no interruptions, but you could make yourself a mare?!"
Sombra gave a grumpy sigh and blew a lock of his mane out of his face. "Yes. It'd take centuries of practice and don't even get me started about how complicated the matters of chromosomes would be, but I would be able to expend the immense amount of magic to throw myself into the very complicated and advanced - for me, not you; it'd be impossible for you - matter of 'flipping' the sex of my equinoid form - which would also change my voice, of course. For me, this wouldn't exactly be 'natural'... but it wouldn't be unnatural either."
Swallowing a chip sharply, Cadance looked at Sombra with wide eyes. "This is pretty deep stuff, yo."
Flicking an offending tuft of dandelion with his magic, Sombra gave a good-natured roll of his eyes. "'Deep' indeed. Now can I continue without your immensely less interesting commentary?"
"Yesdemon."
Sombra's glare found its pink target. "What was that?"
"You don't like 'sir', so I used 'demon'. Nifty, eh?" Cadance smiled awkwardly.
Sombra kept glaring at her. "No."
"But you call yourself a lord-"
"Only ironically."
"Gotcha."
Sombra cleared his throat. "You had better. Now, your second question is simple: I am physically male, so I call myself male."
"And if you weren't?"
Sombra's eye twitched and he held back the urge to light her chip bag up with dark fire. "Then I'd refer to myself as female if I were physically female. This isn't difficult to figure out if you were to put your candy floss brain to use."
"Hey, I do put my brain to use! Just last night I listened to seven vinyls back to back and debated the meaning of life with Shiny."
"How many bags of cheese puffs did you eat?"
"Gosh, Sombra, I wasn't that high, okay? It was just me and Shiny talking about life and listening to real music-"
"I thought you called it 'alternative'. Now, I'm not that familiar with modern music - or music at all - but wouldn't that mean that there's other options?"
"ALL REAL MUSIC IS ALTERNATIVE!"
A faint eye twitch from Sombra. "I'm sure it is, so just how many times did you devolve into shouting that various dairy products were holograms after rambling about the nature of life according to you?"
Cadance crossed her forehooves over her chest. "I. Wasn't. That. High."
"You were and we both know it."
"I wasn't!"
Sombra smiled as arrogantly as possible at Cadance. "Listen, Mac, we both know that you were absolutely blazed and probably can't even recall half the songs you were listening to last night."
Cadance's head drooped. "So what if I was?"
"I think the real question is just how many bags of chips you have in your saddlebags there." Sombra nodded in the direction of her pink saddlebags. Crystal heart fasteners gleamed in sunlight and dozens of dorky charms jangled as a pink forehoof pushed them out of the way in a pointless attempt to conceal the bulging bags that crinkled with hidden stores of ketchup when she touched them.
"A-A few, I guess, I mean-"
"We both know that's not all you have in there."
"Well, there's some magazines since I was going to browse some of the shops for summer hats-"
"Mac," Sombra said, roguish smile widening, "you know that's not what I'm talking about."
"I-"
"How much?"
"M-More than enough... b-but-"
"But what?" Sombra inquired, raising a knowing eyebrow.
"W-Why do you wanna-"
Sombra laughed, and Cadance found the sound to be surprisingly nice. "Why not?"
Cadance looked up, something like determination in her eyes and she reached into the saddlebags with all the fierceness of the warriors of old, the clang of charms that even most teenage fillies might reject as foalish her battle song, the crinkle of chip bags her war cry.
"Let's do this."