Part One
“Sunset! It’s good to see you again.” Twilight stepped forward, embracing her friend and giggling at the other pony’s slightly clumsy attempt to return the quadruped-style hug. “I’m sorry for getting here so late, court just wouldn’t come to an end.”
Sunset chuckled lightly and pulled back, shrugging it off with a mildly embarrassed smile. “Honestly, I kind of forgot about the whole you not living here anymore thing, so I probably could’ve planned it a bit better, too. Luckily Starlight was here to let me through before going back to her school though.”
Twilight nodded. “Yes, I asked her to come here to activate the portal in case I wasn’t on time. I figured you’d probably get anxious if the portal was closed and I couldn’t respond to messages.”
“After the last time? Probably.” Sunset nodded and rubbed her neck. “Although, uhm… we should probably get to the point, if you don’t mind. I left some people on the other side and I don’t think we want to make them wait even more. Who knows what they’ll do if they get impatient.”
“You said something about diplomacy, right? I thought most humans still didn’t know about the portal.”
“Most humans, yeah. These are… well, I told you about those agents, right? The ones from that organisation that actually already knew about magic?”
Twilight nodded, perking up. “Oh yes! S.M.I.L.E., right? It’s a bit fascinating because Equestria actually has a secret agency by that same name… well, not the same same, the acronym stands for something different of course, but– Right, sorry, going off on a tangent.” She chuckled sheepishly. “So, that organization is the one trying to establish first contact?”
“Pretty much… those same agents I’ve mentioned before, actually.” Sunset nodded. “They wanted to, ah… offer something as a sign of good faith? They didn’t give any details.”
“Right. Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? It means we can establish some communication on a professional level with the people in the other world.” Twilight paused, narrowing her eyes at Sunset’s slightly too wide smile and faint nervous sweat. “...it is a good thing, right?”
“Oh yeah, definitely a good thing.” Sunset nodded quickly. “I mean, uhm, in general a good thing? There… might be some minor problems with who they want to send over. I mean, it kind of makes sense, it’s just…”
Twilight sighed and smiled placatingly, putting a hoof on Sunset’s shoulder. “Sunset, calm down. Whatever it is, it’s not your fault and it won’t be anything that’ll irreparably ruin human-pony relations. I mean, I’ve already met humans, I’ll know not to judge them by whoever they happen to send over.” She smirked lightly. “Besides, I have to make diplomacy with griffons and yaks now. They can’t be any worse than that.”
“Hah! Yeah, uhm, funny you should say that…” Sunset laughed nervously, eyes moving back and forth to avoid eye contact. “So, uh… imagine the worst people you could think of to come through that mirror.”
There was a short pause as Twilight processed that. “Sunset… please tell me they didn’t send the Sirens as ambassadors to Equestria.”
“Hah, you wish… look, there’s really no good way to say this. I promise they’re not bad, but–” Sunset flinched and winced as a series of crashes came from deeper in the castle.
Twilight jumped and flared her wings in surprise, taking off towards the noise. “Was that from the mirror room? I thought you deactivated–” She skidded to a stop in front of the door, staring into the room with the mirror portal and the pile of creatures on the floor in front of it.
“–magic lasers from your forehead while I’m stuck with just having wings?! Look, just let me–”
“–if you touch that, don’t think I won’t or can’t just because I have horse legs now!”
“–you try making less of a ruckus, we’re already making enough of a bad impression as… ah, hello Sunset. And Princess Twilight, I assume.”
Sunset groaned softly, rubbing the bridge of her muzzle. “Just… why.”
Twilight just stared, mouth hanging open and eye twitching sporadically as she looked from the centaur giving her a polite bow to the large prevolution-style changeling holding a very familiar pegasus filly in a chokehold as the filly flailed her forehooves towards the changeling’s horn.
Chrysalis and Cozy Glow both paused, as one turning their attention to Twilight to glare at her for interrupting, at least until the changeling adjusted her hold on the filly’s trachea to elicit a squeak and a bug-eyed expression from her.
“...if you think that your awkward staring will make me stop strangling this child, you’re wrong.”
~~~~~
How To Train Your Evil Doppelganger
~~~~~
“Is everything alright, Twilight? I heard a crash and– GAH!” There was a yelp and whoosh of air as Spike backtracked out of the room, carefully poking his head back in and hugging his wings to his chest with both arms. “Villains!”
“How did you three even get here?! I know I closed the portal!” Sunset glared at the three intruders, two of them floating suspended in her magic to keep them apart.
“You can set us down, you know?” Chrysalis huffed, pouting as she hung in the air. “We’re professionals.”
“Professional menaces…” Tirek muttered, before clearing his throat. “My apologies for the surprise, we didn’t intend to make our first impression like this.” He turned his head to glare at his two partners. “You were taking rather long and my partners were getting rather impatient. So Cozy proposed we use the time to test out a setup to open the portal from the other side. I figured we would be in and out before anyone noticed. Unfortunately the transition was a bit less gentle than we’d expected.”
“No, that’s pretty much par for the course for the portal when you use it the first time…” Twilight blinked, then shook her head, backing away a bit to position herself in front of Spike. “Wait wait wait, no, not important right now! You’re the ones who are supposed to take up contact with Equestria? You can’t possibly think that that’s a good idea! No offense, but… no, actually, I think a little bit of offense is warranted, you three are the counterparts of some of the biggest enemies of the state!”
“‘Some of’, she says. Other me must’ve been slacking.”
“Chrysalis.” Tirek gave her a warning glance.
“Hey, she was supposed to give them advance warning!” Chrysalis glared back for a moment before she looked away and mimed zipping her lips shut, sitting down. “Right, sorry. You do the talking.”
“So you three are not our Tirek, Chrysalis and Cozy Glow. And you three are not criminals.” Twilight turned her attention back to this group’s Tirek. The centaur cleared his throat and didn’t say anything, avoiding eye contact. She groaned and turned to Sunset instead. “Seriously?”
Sunset blinked, then groaned and turned to Tirek in turn. “Seriously?”
“Oh come on, you open one little interdimensional portal above a town and nobody lets you live it down!” Cozy piped up from the side, rolling her eyes.
Tirek glared in her direction. “That little portal was the size of that town. You tried to pull an alien spacecraft through.”
“Well, duh.” Cozy rolled her eyes again. “Of course it was big, how else would the UFO have fit through? And it wouldn’t have been trying if your pals hadn’t shut me down.”
“You know, I am strangely not feeling very comforted right now.” Twilight gave Sunset a deadpan stare.
The unicorn winced. “Okay, I didn’t know about that one. But she’s not bad, really, just… very enthusiastic about magic. I mean, you heard the bit about trying to open the mirror, right? And you know that most humans get into trouble with magic because they don’t actually know anything about it. I mean, you told me about that time with the time-travel spell...”
“Do you have to bring that up?” Twilight sighed. “Ugh… fine, I guess I can’t judge someone else for a magical accident, even if it was a bit bigger than average.”
Cozy raised a hoof. “Excuse me?! That one was absolutely 100% intentional. Do you know how many weeks it took to track down that spaceship and get enough power to open that–” She paused, glancing over at the quite unimpressed look Tirek was giving her. “...right.” She mimed a zipper and sat down next to Chrysalis with a huff.
Twilight paused and took the momentary break in the conversation to look the three of them over in more detail, taking notice of the subtle differences. Tirek was the most obvious one, looking much more like the Equestrian Tirek in his prime than the admittedly millennia-old centaur she’d fought against. There was no white in either his hair or his beard and he was wearing an expensive looking suit and tie instead of silver bangles and neckpiece.
Chrysalis seemed to be slightly smaller than her royal counterpart, looking a bit more sleek and less ragged, with no holes in her legs and mane and only slightly tattered wings, and a silver scarab brooch on a plain black collar around her neck.. Where the Queen usually put effort into projecting an overbearing presence, however, this one’s presence slipped in and out of her awareness depending on whether the changeling wanted her attention or not.
Cozy Glow looked the most like her Equestrian counterpart, with only slightly shorter curls lacking a bow, an unassuming coin necklace around her neck and a more open expression than Twilight had ever seen on the filly short of when she was trying to conquer Equestria, showing mildly bored aloofness at the moment. A covert glance at her flank also showed a different cutie mark, a four-by-four chessboard with a single black pawn on the bottom row.
Tirek cleared his throat again and she quickly snapped her attention back to him. “Anyway, as I was saying. As it stands we are only here as liaisons towards our world’s S.M.I.L.E. agency. Someone else is slated to become ambassador to your country once we reach that point.” He refrained from glancing at anyone else in the room. “That said, Miss Shimmer did pass on much of her information you gave her on what has been going on over the last few years. Specifically, the part about our counterparts moving against Equestria.” He raised an eyebrow. “She said that the situation was handled and under control, but not much more. Going by some of her other stories on threats that you had handled – including these – I’m assuming that they were not actually completely disposed of but rather sealed away somewhere.”
Twilight blinked in confusion before nodding slowly. “Well… yes. They’ve been petrified by the Princ– I mean by Celestia and Luna and locked away somewhere safe. Why do you ask?” She kept herself from making it sound like an accusation, but couldn’t help narrowing her eyes just a bit.
The centaur held up his arms. “I don’t intend to disparage your victory or your system of imprisonment and reformation, but from what I’ve heard this kind of solution has turned out to not be… quite as final as intended. Very, very long-term, yes, but if I understand it right then the last years have had a lot of these kinds of imprisonments run out, and this one will probably eventually begin to degrade as well, yes? Not in the near future or even the next few centuries maybe, but at some point your and possibly our world will have to deal with them once again, if I understand it right.”
Twilight glanced away, unwilling to admit but unable to completely disregard the notion either. “It’s… not entirely impossible. Before this kind of thing was done by the magic of Harmony itself… Celestia and Luna are powerful, but I don’t know for sure if a regular spell will be more stable and lasting or less, so I can’t say that there isn’t some kind of limit to it that it might reach centuries from now.” She tilted her head. “I’m not entirely sure what your concern with this is, though. Unless humans live a lot longer than I’ve been led to believe.”
“No, anyone from our side of the mirror would be long dead at that point.” He shook his head. “What I’m leading up to is more a token of good faith, if you will. Our world has, at this point, still a very limited amount of magic inherent to it, and our agency in particular is well equipped to handle anything that they might be able to do, from what I’ve heard of their abilities. We’re here to offer to take them off your hands… hooves, so to speak, and deal with them now instead of in a few centuries when they might break free without warning and nobody remembers anymore how they were handled in the first place.”
“I would still remember, as would Princess Celestia, Luna and Cadance.” Twilight shook her head lightly. “No offense, but why would you offer to do this? And what makes you think that your method of dealing with them would be better than leaving them as they are? They could get up to quite a bit of trouble in your world before simply returning to ours through the mirror.”
“You make good points.” Tirek nodded. “As I said, it’s mostly intended to be a show of good faith on our part, to start relations off on a good note with a kind of assistance we’re uniquely prepared to provide. As for trouble, I do believe that we are equipped to handle whatever they might try, especially if their magic on the other side of the portal is limited as much as it has been for any other Equestrian who crossed over so far.” He raised an eyebrow. “We do keep track as much as we can. Still, if there are some unforeseen complications, we can at the very least subdue them for long enough to either imprison them ourselves, or have them sealed away again by you and your friends.”
Twilight frowned and looked between the three for a moment, noting with some surprise how the other two agents had been sitting quietly and politely back this whole time, before turning to Sunset with a sigh. “This seems like either a really good or a really bad idea and I can’t tell which one it is. What do you think?”
Sunset tilted her head and shrugged, frowning lightly. “I mean, honestly, I don’t think anything involving your version of these three can be called good, per se. But they do have a point, I think… from what you’ve told me, most of what made them so dangerous each time they showed up was setup. As long as they keep an eye on them, there’s only so much they can do. That’s why I even agreed to let them make their proposal in the first place.”
Tirek nodded, interjecting again. “Indeed. We only have a summary of events, of course, but they mostly seemed to have gotten to where they were through subterfuge and preparation. At their base level, I believe that they don’t pose much of a threat even just against us three, and we have the technology to keep them closely monitored at all times once they’re on our side of the mirror. I would ask for a more detailed account of everything you know of them, but from what I heard so far we and some of our agency’s analysts are of the hope that we can turn them… not to the side of good, but maybe to a more productive than destructive neutral grey area. Or forced and supervised community service, at worst.”
Twilight stared at him for a moment, then sighed and slumped down. “I still don’t like it. But I’m a ruler now and sometimes that means doing things I don’t like if it’s for the better of Equestria.” She straightened up and narrowed her eyes. “No unnecessary risks. I want to be informed regularly of what happens with them and if there’s any sign that they might become more of a problem than you can handle you contact me immediately.”
Tirek bowed his head politely. “That’s only fair. I have a contract over the extradition and some limited authority to negotiate. We already expected to agree to some concessions and safety measures, this is intended as a show of goodwill after all.”
“Alright. Don’t like it. Don’t like anything to do with those three, really.” Twilight let out one particularly deep sigh as she turned around to head back out the door. “I’ll have to make some arrangements to have their statue brought here safely and to get together all the people we need to reverse the petrification. We can discuss the details while we wait on that.”
She only made it a couple steps before a loud thud and yelp made her jump in surprise, wings flaring again and flapping to turn her around still in the air. Sunset, and Chrysalis had similarly jumped to the side and Cozy Glow was hovering in the air like her, all four of them looking down at the tangle of limbs on the floor. There was a snicker from Spike before he quickly slapped his claws over his mouth.
Tirek stayed there for a moment before slowly and deliberately pulling his four legs apart and pushing himself up on his hands enough to glare at Chrysalis. “Not a word.”
~~~~~
Twilight looked around the room at her friends spread out in a half-circle, all of them either subtly backing away or leaning toward the three people from the other world at the far wall with suspicious looks. At the center of the room was the statue of the three petrified villains, awaiting their release.
“So, how exactly is other-me hanging in the air like that?” Cozy looked around at the glares now focused on her. “What?! I can’t be the only one thinking it, that tail can’t possibly be structurally sound enough for that!” She huffed and sat down again, crossing her forelegs with a pout.
“...alright. Is everyone ready?” Twilight looked around one last time before slowly rising into the air, letting her magic flow and drawing on her connections to the ponies around her, a rainbow of magic starting to swirl around the room and wrap around the statue and slowly causing cracks to appear. The magic only lasted for a moment before disappearing again, followed by the cracked layer of stone bursting apart into dust a second later and sending the three villains sprawling in an undignified heap.
“Gah, what–? You!” Queen Chrysalis was the first to gather her bearings and jump up, glaring at Twilight as she lit her horn with blazing green magic. “I don’t know what your game is but I will yeeeow!” She yelped and collapsed, rubbing the base of her sparking horn and groaning for a moment before looking around at the changeling who had jabbed her horn and was now standing over her. “What?! Impostor! Who are you?!”
She leveraged herself back up to lean in close and attempt to intimidate the other one. “I said reveal yourself! Are you that whelp Thorax come to- yaaarghle!” Several of the ponies present winced as the Queen was suplexed back to the floor, limbs bent in several uncomfortable directions. “Not Thorax, not Thorax! Pharynx, maybe?”
“Defeated by your own minions, how predictable. This is why I hurg–” Lord Tirek was cut off along with his air supply, leaving him scrabbling ineffectively at the hand crushing his windpipe.
“I’d appreciate some courtesy towards my partner. She’d make a terrible minion, at that. No respect for authority.” After a few seconds the hand loosened just enough to let him breathe, pulling him around to face a much younger version of himself. The other Tirek glared down at him for a moment before turning to Twilight. “I didn’t expect him to be this old and weak. Are you sure he’ll even survive the next few years?”
“That is his form without any stolen magic. He is over a thousand years old after all. You can understand why we’d rather not give him any additional power, but there’s no reason to think that he won’t live another few centuries at the least.” Twilight paused, looking around with mild alarm. “Wait, where’s Cozy Glow?”
“Tried to sneak out while you were distracted.” The human Cozy Glow spoke up from the doorway, standing on top of her pony counterpart who’d been wrapped up in enough rope to leave only her head visible. “Don’t worry, she’s not going anywhere.”
“Right…” Twilight glanced at Cozy’s flank to be sure, relaxing a bit at the confirmation that all three villains were appropriately subdued for the time being. “Right. Let’s not waste any time then. You’ll understand if I want to get rid of them as quickly as possible.” She nodded to herself and stepped aside to let the human agents carry the villains out the door, down the hallway towards the portal room where the mirror was already activated.
“Completely understandable.” Tirek grabbed Queen Chrysalis with his free hand, letting his partners go ahead before unceremoniously tossing the three villains through the portal one after the other. “I won’t intrude on your hospitality any longer than necessary then, although I hope we’ll establish a more regular contact beyond the updates on their rehabilitation and punishment.”
Twilight watched him step through the portal as well before glancing over at Sunset. “This still seems like a terrible idea.”
Sunset shrugged. “There’s a lot of people making sure they stay in line, now. I’m just glad if I never have to meet them again. Imagine trying to distinguish them by name, what a mess.”
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abc.net.au/news/image/10966894-3x2-940x627.jpg
10489699
Chrysalis is the type of person who deliberately says "Why you little..." and Cozy respects her more for it. Because they're all unapologetically crazy.
Bwahaha. Spot on. I utterly loved Mr and Mrs S.M.I.L.E., and this is looking like an entirely worthy sequel so far.
I'm... a little surprised... at Cozy Glow being an agent, while presumably the age of EqG Apple Bloom and friends... But on second thoughts it actually makes a scary amount of sense. That level of devious ingenuity in a precocious child, if not actually directed towards utter villainy, could well lead to a very effective agent. If often infuriating to be around.
10489834
Glad you liked the story. And yes, taking her into the agency was the best they could do because she would have gotten into magic shenanigans either way. But they don't send her out on missions and if she does get involved in something it's all in Canterlot where the magical problems tend to be on a high school level.
...A fireball-slinging, reality-destroying high school. I'm starting to think there might have been a reason she agreed to this placement so readily.
This is very Twilight! Completely ignoring that the most destructive magical criminal in Equestria Girls history is... why yes, it's Twilght's own EG counterpart
10490972
You can't compare that, it's completely different! She was wearing glasses!
"Yes."
One of the best single lines of dialogue I have ever read. :D
10840874
Honestly this whole story is mostly written so I had enough words to put around that single line.
10842448
Tracked this down over the course of like an hour or more, because I remembered it due to this Featured Story: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/512488/a-cozy-parent-teacher-conference
Not even done rereading this first chapter! So good!