//------------------------------//
// (Past Chapter 8) Handled Like a Dream 
// Story: The Unique Properties of Dark Magic 
// by Shadestyle 
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I hadn't been dreaming since I got here, when I first had one here, though, it was a bit of a nightmare.  That is to say, it was literally of a mare aligned with the night.

Everything's a bit hazy as I leap over buildings shrouded in mist, even though it feels like there's no gravity at all, I still slowly glide back down after each of my jumps.

I stop in front of a metal sign on the freeway for a while, staring at it.

Eventually, I end up in a room, holding a remote.  Whenever I try to press buttons on the remote, my finger slips away from it at the last second, frustrating me.

"What odd dreams thou leadst.  Mayhaps thou wouldst enjoy them more if you did not change between them quite so frequently,"  A voice says, making me ponder her words.

"Did you know you actually always dream several times a night?  Dreamless sleep is simply the result of you not remembering your dreams when you wake up,"  I respond.

The voice looks confused at this.

"We do not know from where thou heard that, but it is untrue.  Dreams are only forgotten when they are made to be forgotten, and cruel magic can indeed take those dreams away, for a time.  It is curious that you had not dreamt until I sought out your unconscious mind in this realm.  But it was a trifle to correct whatever illness had plagued thy mind."

I hear her, but her words don't really register with me.  Until the dream becomes lucid, anyway.

"I would prefer that my dreams remain unvisited, Luna."

Vague mist becomes a material visage, as the Princess of the Night manifests in front of me, and the room solidifies.

She stares at me, cool as a cucumber.  "We assure thou that this state of affairs is preferable to an interrogation in the waking world.  My sister has not the patience for the subtle art of traversing the dream realm, while traversing to thine doorstep remains an act for which no patience is required."

I get the feeling that my urge to glare at her won't be hidden by me not doing it, in a place like this.  "Cracking open my mind in the waking world would give her nothing but an unsavory mess.  I fear you would have better luck doing so here."

She nods, taking a dainty seat on my couch.  "Indeed.  And so we are here."

"You may not have depopulated a city, but thou dost yet reek of sorcery most foul.  We would have honest answers to divine the truth out from under the poor reputation thine trickery has given you between us."

I respond directly.  "Survival, Princess.  That's the only answer you should need."

She is unfazed by my declaration.  "And yet we will have more.  Where didst thou learn the dark spells thou used, why do you claim dominion over the citizens of the Crystal Empire among those who have escaped, what reason do we have to trust thine intentions, when thy mind is stewing even now in the magic of evil?"

Under the assumption that she can simply take the answers by force if I'm not careful, I decide to answer honestly.  "I am self-taught.  I can cast no spells that I did not come across while plumbing the depths of my own self."

Luna's gaze sharpens.  "Ridiculous.  I am no slouch on the subject of dark magic, foal.  The spells we have seen used are too varied to come from a mere hobbyist, bumbling around in the dark."

"We have yet to divine thine truthful words from thy deceitful ones through the force of magic as an act of trust.  Thou willt not betray that trust."

I gulp.  "Princess, if you're going to extract the answers by force, then just get it over with.  I won't be called a liar until I make one of myself."

"I hated the snow, and it caught on fire.  I wanted to make valuable crystals, and they grew.  The spells just came to me, and if you don't trust that, then you're not trusting in the truth."

Luna suddenly starts to giggle at my words, infuriating me.  "My word you are bold.  If you are bluffing, then your arrogance is greater than can be measured.  I dare say, where was this bravado previously?" She says, giggling more and more.

"Roughly seven miles away with my broken teeth,"  I growl.

At this point, she's trying to keep from bursting into laughter utterly, and failing.

"Fine, fine!" She says, dragging herself back under control with only a few minor outbursts of giggles, before waving at me to continue.

"A hopeless savant of the vilest magics of our world bumbles into spells unheard of by sane ponies, and masters them in mere weeks.  Convinced as I am of that, you may continue with your fanciful tale."

Taking a deep breath to rein my temper in, I do as she says, plopping down into my computer chair and swiveling around to face the jovial princess.

"I didn't claim dominion over the Crystal Ponies.  They shanghai'd me into it.  Sombra's dumbass wards aren't able to detect anyone using dark magic, so I had to use dark magic on the ponies' behalf.  I've got tactics that he doesn't know how to fight against, so I had to plan everything on the ponies' behalf.  I've got tricks that Sombra's idiotic enough to fall for, so I had to direct operations on the ponies' behalf."

"I told them not to build a damn throne, but then they just pulled out the puppy-dog-eyes until I relented.  I didn't actually ask for any of this."

Glaring at Luna to see what part of my story sets her off this time, I'm stunned when she nods as though it were obvious.

She clarifies.  "Ponies do tend to do that."

"Sister tends to solve that problem by disguise public works as being her own, and lamenting when ponies do something extravagant for her instead of donating time and bits to those causes.  Turnabout is fair play, when the... Puppy-dog-eyes... are brought out,"  She explains, slowly avoiding stumbling over my terminology.

She visibly reins in her merriment, and starts speaking Shakespearian again.  "But now we arrive at the most important question.  What are thine motives, thy intentions?  Thou hast used dark magic more extensively than many whose minds are now corrupt.  The force of thy hatred even now hangs over the land as a miasma.  How could such a state possibly be reconciled with thou being anything but a threat to Equestria and the Crystal Empire alike?"

"Thou hast even claimed that thou wanted nothing to do with the task that the Crystal Ponies have thrust onto you, is there anything, anything at all, with which to prove you would not bitterly do them harm when your patience reaches its end?"

I'm baffled at this.  "That's a pretty grim thought, I hate plenty of things, but I'm not just going to hurt someone, that's kinda psychotic."

Luna's confused expression leads me to believe I just said something wrong, so I quickly rephrase my statement.

"That is to say, uhh...  I channel my feelings constructively?"

"I hate Sombra's guts, so I'm going to act on that, I want shiny things, so I'll make shiny things, I get frustrated with problems, so I'll solve them.  Even if I were willing to hurt innocent people, which I'm not, I have no reason to."

"I don't want to do it, but in this line of work, I must do many things I do not enjoy."

"Is that not how it works?"

Luna doesn't immediately respond, making me extremely nervous that that might not actually be how it works for the average pony.

Her next words relieve me somewhat.  "Your approach to managing the dark arts is naive, but intriguing.  I see now why I had been prepared to halt my sister's spell, had it threatened striking you."

So it was just a vastly overblown good-cop bad-cop routine that they had been trying to run on me.  I had my suspicions, thinking back to that night, but decided it wasn't worth pondering further at the time.

After a long pause, Luna nods.  "Very well, your words have bought you a reprieve from my scrutiny, if nothing else."

Sensing her intent to leave, I have to ask.  "Wait, if you're here, then why haven't you destroyed Sombra yet?  You should be more than capable of it."

Luna looks annoyed, but not with me.  "There exist magics whose sole purpose is to repel an alicorn, and an alicorn alone.  Every time a new form of the spell is crafted, it takes time for me and my sister to divine how to defeat it."

"What about the Elements of Harmony?"  I wonder, thinking about why they didn't use them on Sombra in the show.

Luna's tilted head doesn't bode well.  "The what?"

A touch of dread bubbles up in my gut.  "The Elements of Harmony, you know, the relics you used to defeat Discord.  Honesty, Kindness, Loyalty, Generosity, Laughter and Magic?"

"I do not know what you are talking about.  I have not heard tell of any Elements, nor do I know who this "Discord" is."

My stomach drops out from under me.  That's not how the show went...

She looks around the wobbling room.  "You are waking up.  We will discuss this further another time.  Fare thee well, "Lord" Weiss." She says, fading into blue smoke along with the rest of my dream.

I wake up suddenly, and immediately make a beeline towards the Wacky Workbench Zone's fast travel rail.





"Why do you need a dreamcatcher, anyway?  Is Luna not taking care of your nightmares?  That would be pretty rude on her part."  Priss says as I flip through a tome named "Sleepnir's Restful Rocks", my eyes very slowly reading through the foreign text.

This time, she had jammed my door open with a wad of gypsum, preventing the lock from actually engaging when I closed my door, and allowing her to slip in unopposed to harass me.  I'll have to keep that trick in mind, and proof our doors against it in the future.

"No clue, I haven't been having any nightmares.  What I do have, however, is a problem, considering the door to my mind doesn't even have a lock on it," I respond, sipping from a mug of crystal juice.  Considering it's quite literally magically flavored water, it has no right being as delicious as it is.  Now if only my R&D ponies could figure out how to make it fizz.

I had been unnaturally willing to share information while I was asleep, I feel now, and whether or not that's because I was intimidated by someone who could probably turn my grey matter into soup, or because I had been manipulated somehow while I was asleep is irrelevant, because It cannot happen again.

"The Pony of Crystal may take, of moonstone, and they will bake it in their power of a dream awoken from whose memory they wish captured in the soft morning of a summer in a meadow, and they will awake it in a wash of their power of a fearful anticipation, of a deadline to one's work in refitting the moulding of the castle's doorways, and it will become a Moon Crystal, with inside a dream will begin to occur, and a dream will not occur within the mind of a pony near it,"  I read, with some disgust at the formatting and phrasing.

She chews on a piece of rock gum, listening to my reading.

"Who'd want to break in, anyway?  Nothing worth stealing up there, and they'd have to wipe their hooves on the way out,"  She snarks with a pop of gum.

"Are you kidding?  There are things in my dome would make your little filly head spin,"  I say firmly, to which I receive a deadpan stare.

She rolls her eyes at me.  "Probably just my eyes, actually."

I groan.  "Don't you have something better to do with your time?"

She ponders my words for a moment.  "As a matter of fact, you're right.  I shouldn't be mocking your intelligence when I'm so behind on mocking the rest of you."

I put a hoof firmly to my face.

"Let's see, what's on the itinerary," She asks herself.

"Oh, yeah, how about that time at the pool?"  She remembers.

I groan louder, clapping my book shut, now that I'm fully aware I won't be able to read it with her interference.  "Please, let's not talk about that.  I know how to swim, I just don't... I'm out of practice."

She gives me a knowing look.  "Is that what the adults call it?"

At my unamused glare, she continues.  "So, have I finally annoyed you enough to get you out of here and into the fray again?  You've been in here since you found that dumb book at the library."

This marks my turn to roll my eyes.  "Fine, I need to pick up the Moon Crystals for testing anyway."

Tipping a non-extant hat to me, Priss trots off, to do whatever it is young fillies do when they aren't viciously mocking me.

"Foul little imp," I mutter fondly, chuckling as I leave my room as well.





I find myself anxious as I look at the moon crystal on my desk, a mere paperweight until someone falls asleep near it.  The work of my R&D team's best efforts to produce a crystal to my exacting specifications, with a few more enchantments here and there.

Sadly, as much as I might like to, I can't afford to fall asleep in the middle of "court", an endless parade of ponies coming into my office, asking me to approve things, and then sending in more of their kind.

I have to find a better way to handle this.  Spending hours and hours a day personally tending to every little thing that the Shadow Realm needs an authority for is cutting into perfectly good testing time.

"-and that's why I believe, with the amount of ponies we have now, and our new weapons, we should take the fight to Sombra, we can take him now, and free The Empire!"

Oh dear.  I better take care of this before continuing the rest of my internal monologue.

I hold up a hoof.  "I absolutely agree.  There's just three small things we need, just to make sure.  I'd like you to work on getting me these things, and we can begin the assault immediately."

"First, I'd like you to find something invincible, and demonstrate to me that it can be destroyed.  Secondly, I'd like you to bring me a corpse made out of smoke, and, this is a very important one, I'd like you to hogtie Celestia and dump her in the middle of my office."

He sputters at my insane demands.  "T-those demands are impossible, what are you talking about?!"

I shrug.  "You told me we are ready to fight Sombra, an invincible god who can turn to smoke.  So I'd like you to demonstrate that we can defeat that which is invincible, that which is a god, and that which is made of smoke.  As soon as you can, I'll begin preparing for a direct assault."

"Until then, we continue our hit-and-run tactics.  I won't risk lives on bluster, Mr. Helmsplitter."

I dismiss the guard captain, and have the next pony sent in.

Oh, finally, someone I'm actually excited to see.  My loyal spymaster.

"Ahh, if it isn't Iceland Spar.  I trust you've got news for me?"

The dark green coated pony nods, his white cloak shuffling.  "It is as you predicted, milord.  Sombra has had no choice but to release some of the slaves from his mine back into their homes to grow food, with the population as low as it is."

"May I ask why we have no further raids planned, when the machine of his tyranny is even now bleeding?"

I nod.  "Yes, you can."

I wait for him to realize my phrasing, before he continues.  If he's annoyed with my subtle fooling around, he doesn't show it.

"Why do we not have further raids planned, milord?"

I nod again.  "Because now the entire Crystal Empire is poisoned.  He's releasing slaves that were once under mind control.  We have no way to cure Sombra's mind control once it has been applied, and we have no way to tell whether or not the ponies have truly been freed of his control.  If we take even a single pony out of the empire that Sombra could reactivate, it would expose the cell in an instant."

"We've backed him into a corner, where rats fight the hardest."

"Right now, we wait, and we rest.  And then, later, we prepare, and we grow in power."

He nods at this, and takes my message to the rest of the scouting teams to assuage their concerns.





"Weiss, this is ridiculous.   I'm never going to figure out my spell unless I do it the way that professionals do it,"  Eclipse says, frustrated.

I laugh.  "Eclipse, I've been reading the works of those so-called professionals.  They shouldn't be writing flipbooks, much less spellbooks."

She glares.  "Well, telling me to "Figure out each individual emotion I felt" isn't helpful at all, I should be trying to figure out how to feel like I did in that exact moment, instead of pointlessly trying to pick it apart first."

"Your book is just as ridiculous.  You can't just tell a pony that they need to feel hate to cast Black Flame, you need to describe the feeling, make them feel what you felt, so they can cast it as well as you can!"

I snort at this.  "No, idiot, I need them to feel what they feel.  Just because the methods in existing spellbooks are old doesn't mean they're good.  Making the reader understand what feelings are needed is more important than using flowery outdated wording to attempt to make the reader empathize with you."

"Although clearly, my student, you are doubtful.  That's good.  It means you'll seek out an even better way in the future.  But first, we're going to take a break, and I'm going to demonstrate why I'm right."

Eclipse catches the glass of juice I slide to her, and drain my own in seconds, after the hours of magic attempts, we had been no closer to Eclipse realizing the power of her Merciful Bulwark again.

When she finishes her own glass, I begin to explain my new plan.  "I want you to think about something you hate a lot."

Groaning, she responds.  "I don't want to cast your dark spells Weiss, dark magic drives ponies crazy."

"Don't worry, I just need a demonstration.  You know as well as I do from the Grimoire Noir that dark magic's emotionally altering effect only applies if you lack sufficient emotion.  You've got more than enough hate to cast the spell, if you'll just do as I say.  And it will more than prove my methods as superior."

She groans.  "It's not going to work, Weiss, it takes hours at the best of times for a pony to even begin to understand a spell, it's not as simple as just summoning up a memory and trying to cast the spell."

Despite her complaints, she glares at me, and her hooves catch on fire, the black flames of hatred puffing up on them adorably, like a cat frightened by a splash of water.

The stunned silence of her brain cranking to a halt is sweet music to my ears.





After a long, mostly entertaining day, I'm finally able to get to the real meat of what I had planned.  I set the enchanted Moon Crystal next to my bed on my shelf, and activate its enchantments.  Time to see if this thing really works, or if I'm just going to have to live with the fact that Luna and anyone else can waltz into my brain whenever they want with no way to protect myself.

Though my nervousness makes it difficult, I eventually doze off, and fall into the embrace of sleep.

I "awaken" inside a blue, crystalline room.  Outside, I can see my room in macro.  Though it seems like I'm inside the crystal itself, in reality, this is just the way my mind interprets the magic of the crystal intercepting my dreams.

Summoning up a chair, I summon up my dream-interpretation of some of the crystal's other features.  Feature number one, communication.

The Gameboy floating in front of me lights up with a nostalgic "bling!", before displaying a live feed of another crystalline room, inside which Dr. A.R Homeopathy is waving excitedly.

I wave back, before the Nintendo DS that forms the dream-representation of my next test lights up with its own noise of activation.  This one displays something far less impressive, a simple calculator, modified so that it doesn't use letters or numbers, but instead, a verbal response mechanism and inputs.

Voicing out "One plus one" to the DS's microphone, my grin expands when the device responds with "Two", in a pleasant female voice.  What makes this impressive is, the calculator's actual control crystal is all the way in Wacky Workbench Zone, which my Moon Crystal was able to communicate with.

I turn back to Dr. Real's feed.

"Tell the dudes I said good work, Dr. Real!  This is the beginning of stage two, I believe!"

He nods excitedly, already accessing other magical computers in his own Moon Crystal to perform further experiments, and communicate with the lab boys in his sleep.

My smile shrinks, and then grows a bit when I hear a loud, drum-like pounding on the walls.  Looking over at the sight of Luna impatiently pounding on the wall, making ripples roll harmlessly across its surface, I trot over.

I dampen my satisfaction as I alter the walls of the crystal into an airlock to let her inside, and summon up two copies of a familiar couch. "I greet you, Princess Luna of Equestria.  I hope this night has found you well."

She glares at me, taking a seat.  "What is the meaning of this, Weiss?  I return your dreams to you, and you lock me out of them as thanks?"

I make myself look harmlessly curious at this as I probe her for information.  "Can you not enter these as freely as any other dream?"

Her glare softens.  "I cannot, Weiss.  It would take the effort of a night to cast you out of this thing, if you were besieged by a nightmare, there would be nothing I could do."

Thankfully, these crystals by design cannot be set to automatically allow visitors from the outside dream realm.  And even if she managed to pull me out of one crystal, that just means I need to keep a backup.

"Unfortunately, these crystals by design cannot be set to automatically allow visitors from the outside dream realm, Princess.  But I will be sure to allow you in, so long as you ask politely,"  I say with hidden firmness.

She searches my face for any signs of deception, but, unfortunately for her, I haven't deceived her in any way.

She gives me a look that makes guilt pool in my gut.  "You fear me too much, Weiss.  I do not mean you harm."

I shake my head genuinely.  "I'm not frightened of you, Luna.  I am concerned.  What can be done by you can be done by others.  An enemy may one day approach my dreams who means me harm.  And now that day will not come without a fight."

She turns my words over in her mind.  "If it quenches your fears, then I will take no offense to your transgression, just this once."

I nod affably. "It most certainly does.  Any pony feels safer within a fortress, after all, but even fortresses require a guardian without.  Of which there is only one that I trust,"  I say, gesturing to Luna.

She must not receive as much thanks for her work as she deserves, as this makes her flush with embarrassment.

"It is my duty, your thanks are appreciated, but not required."

She's going to be so pissed when she realizes I plan on distributing these things for free.

As she leaves, I look around.  As lucid as I am right now, this isn't really much of a "Dream" World, I feel.

But between the computer crystals, communications between other moon crystals, and the magically enhanced radio-waves allowing all of this, I think it would make a very suitable Digital World.

Not that I plan on having any monsters in here, but it's still a fun thought.