Fphantom strode confidently into the Enslavement challenge. To his surprise, the room he found himself in was an exact replica of his abandoned home, the place where he'd lived before dropping everything to go on this crazy adventure. He had no regrets about leaving the dusty old cave, even if the limestone stalagmites and stalactites were super cool.
After all, he'd made several friends and had a steady supply of food, two things his old cave had been severely lacking. And besides, caves were boring.
"Nice place you've got here," Ner'Ghalad commented. Fphant's sharp eyes zeroed in on the source of the necromancer's voice and for the second time in as many minutes he was surprised. Instead of speaking through the walls like he usually did, Ner'Ghalad was seated at a card table set up in the center of the room smoking a cheap cigar and playing solitaire. A small dish with several scones was set in the center of the table.
There was a second chair set up at the card table. Fphantom moved over to it and sat down. He picked up one of the scones and bit into it. It was a pretty good scone. "Yeah," he said, "I tried to keep it cleaned up for any visitors I managed to get. I even had an illusory advertising mechanism up top that was designed to lead ponies down into my cave."
"Did it work?" Ner' asked, sounding genuinely interested.
"Well, sort of." Fphant shrugged. The shrug looked totally bizarre since, at that moment, Fphantom's arms had morphed into a mass of squiggling tentacles that sort of just flopped about for a second. "The only pony that ever actually came down into my cave is currently my traveling companion slash free buffet on legs."
"Ah, right." Ner' finished his game of solitaire with a flourish and turned his undivided attention to Fphantom. "How does that work, exactly?" he asked. "I mean, I know you're a mirage, but I thought mirages fed off of false hopes? How does an optimistic pony like him provide enough sustenance for a spirit like you to live?"
Instead of answering immediately, Fphantom looked to the walls of the cave. Being a creature of illusion, he could sense that the cave itself was just a product of Ner'Ghalad's magic turning thought into form. With a minor exertion of will, Fphant hijacked the illusion magic and replaced the image of the cave with an image of his own.
Limestone walls gave way to a stark white aesthetic. Classy music began playing softly from some unseen speaker system. Dozens of picture frames sprouted from the white walls, followed swiftly by the pictures themselves. The whole shift took just under three seconds and the two found themselves in a facsimile of an art museum. A smirk graced his face when he saw Ner's surprised expression.
"While it's true that the majority of mirages only feed on the dashed hopes of their victims," Fphantom said, "That doesn't mean it's our only potential food source. My main food source these past few weeks has been confusion, and let me tell you, it has been abundant."
The lighting in the room dimmed and a single spotlight highlighted one of the framed pictures. The picture was a stylistic oil painting depicting a large rock traversing the wilderness with several passengers perched atop it.
The spotlight shifted to the picture next to it, this one a black and white photograph which captured an explosion rocking the base of a stone tower. Little bits of stone, door, and a single pony were all frozen in the act of being flung violently away.
Again and again the light shifted showing off many different improbable scenes, each one featuring the same earth pony. Sometimes he was alone, like in the sketch which showed him cut apart into little pieces held in magic, and sometimes he had company, one picture showed him tossing a rock at a skeleton that only he could see. In every single picture he could be seen sporting his signature madpony grin.
"So many crazy and improbable things have happened to us since we set off on this adventure." Fphantom paused as the spotlight highlighted one last picture, which showed two figures sitting at a milkshake bar. In the picture the mirage was laughing at the pony's consternation as his food disappeared from right under his nose.
"An intangible concept like confusion doesn't have to come from somepony for me to feed off it. So long as a situation is sufficiently absurd I can eat my fill and nopony would notice." Fphantom grinned widely, revealing several rows of strangely rounded teeth. "I've been getting more than enough confusion from my friends to make up for their general lack of dashed hopes."
At some point Ner'Ghalad had procured a notepad and was scribbling away furiously. "Fascinating," he said. "I've read books about spirits such as you, but hearing it straight from the horse's mouth, as it were, is so much more enlightening."
"No problem," Fphant said. "By the way, wasn't there supposed to be some kind of challenge in here or something?"
"Hmm?" Ner' was so engrossed in his notepad that he almost missed the question. "Oh! Right!" He coughed awkwardly. "Well, my plan was to assault you with a bunch of terrifying illusions in a sort of dreamscape until you begged me for mercy, but I bet you could see through just about any illusion I threw at you."
"Damn straight."
"So I guess, considering the information you've given me and that it would probably just be a waste of time, I can give you a pass on the challenge. But just this once!" Ner' waggled a hoof at Fphantom as if the mirage was in need of admonishment. "Don't you expect to get any more freebies!"
Fphant blinked. "Ok, cool. I'll be going then."
"Ta! I enjoyed our little chat." Ner'Ghalad went back to scribbling furiously on his notepad, muttering to himself under his breath.
With how intently Ner' was focused, Fphantom realized that further conversation was pointless and got up from his seat at the card table. After determining which illusory wall the exit door was hiding behind, he set off at a brisk walk thataway.