High up in the mountains to the west of the Everfree forest, Lyra presided over a summoning beacon the size of a baseball field. It looked a lot like the kinds of summoning circles you used to summon demons, but surprisingly used no magic at all. It was built to the exact specifications the aliens transmitted to her and would act as a homing beacon for them to locate the correct planet.
At one end of the beacon, all seventy-two of Lyra’s faithful gathered to greet the aliens. All of them wore the same black cloaks with green highlights.
“Today is the most important day in history!” Lyra called out to them all, getting a cheer. “We are about to witness the entire course of our species be altered! More importantly, we are about to have an awesome party with our alien friends!”
They cheered again. Everypony was so excited.
This was going great! Finally, Lyra would be validated. Finally, she could get off of this stupid planet!
Behind the crowd, from the darkness, Lyra saw two ponies slowly walking up the path to her. Everypony who was going was accounted for so they must have been wandering around lost. Lyra might as well invite them to come with her. How lucky for them!
She took two steps forward to call out to them then stopped when she saw who it was.
The worst possible pony had just shown up.
Starlight Glimmer! The president of Equestria and strongest of the elite four by a wide chasm!
Only one pony accompanied Starlight Glimmer. It was an S ranker and her second in command, Void Walker. A black stallion with neatly combed blue hair, Void was handsome, but a bit scrawny. He had a toothy grin and his red eyes shone in the darkness next to Starlight.
Both of them wore the same black robes with a green trim, same as everypony in their cult. Theirs were the most eleaborate of all, marking them as the highest ranked. Along the edges of each were a cascade of lines remniscent of vines. Void Walker's had nicks along his, denoting thorns and that he was the second highest rank, while Starlight's alone had flowers along her vines.
Void Walker alone could likely take out Lyra’s entire crew. But even if Lyra had one hundred clones of Void fighting for her, she still wouldn’t have any hope against Starlight. If anypony suggested fighting Starlight to Lyra, it’d sound as crazy as suggesting they escape by eating a hole in the ground to the other side of the planet.
Reflexively, Lyra jumped behind one of her followers to hide. The victorious attitude of her cult died down and they all pressed against one another, nopony wanting to be the one in front.
“Is Lyra here?” Starlight spoke with this condescending and overly friendly inflection like she was talking to a kindergartener. “That’s your leader, right?”
They were all too eager to push Lyra out in front, who stumbled ungracefully in front of Starlight. Lyra tried to regain her composure and hide her fear.
“There’s no need to instantly kill us all!” Lyra immediately bowed down. “I know what this looks like, but we’re not summoning demons. We’re summoning aliens which technically isn’t against the rules.”
“Yes. I know.” Starlight sat down, leaning against a large rock. Void jumped up on top of that same rock to grin down at them from behind.
“You knew about the aliens?” Lyra’s eye twitched. The government knew but they didn’t do anything?!
“Of course I know there are aliens. You think you noticed their spaceship but I didn’t?” Starlight asked. “I just want to make sure our visitors don’t cause any problems.”
“You should best hope they don’t try anything uncouth, little girl.” Void walker’s laugh was sinister and raspy. “Why it’d be, let’s say, unspeakable if you were caught in the crossfire.”
Lyra held her breath, wanting to scream but knowing that saying anything rude could put her life in serious danger.
Maybe there was a slim chance the aliens would be able to fight her? They could travel faster than the speed of light so they could do anything, right? Though even then Lyra would no doubt get deleted from existence or worse during the fight!
All she could do was call the aliens and hope for the best at this point.
“I’ll tell them to be extra polite!” Lyra laughed nervously. “We’re going straight to their planet anyway! No need to turn me inside out or whatever it is you do. Hehe!”
Lyra turned around on the spot and awkwardly marched back into position. Starlight creeped her the freak out. No way she was inviting those two onto the spaceship.
“Please don’t be a sperg. Please don’t be a sperg.” Lyra silently prayed to the aliens as she waited for them to arrive.
The runic circle below them began to glow. Lyra felt a sensation of weightlessness, not quite enough to lift her off the ground, but her cloak and main did lift ever so slightly.
A new star appeared in the sky. The star grew rapidly, then warped into a beam of light until it was hanging above them and crystalized into its true form.
A spaceship! A massive saucer-shaped spaceship floated above them, green lights swirling around the bottom rim. It stopped directly above the circle Lyra prepare, but the ship was far larger than the footprint it mirrored.
Though it was much higher than the clouds, it still filled an impressive amount of the sky. That thing had to be enormous! It may very well have thousands of feet long, though Lyra had no idea how to estimate its size.
All of her followers began to cheer, jumping up and down and hugging one another, at the sight of the spacecraft! It’d actually worked! All those ponies who called Lyra insane were officially wrong!
Lyra glanced back to Starlight, euphoric with victory.
Starlight made a show of yawning while Void Walker snickered behind her. Lyra grumbled under her breath. How could she not be impressed by an alien spaceship?! What kind of freakish outer realm drugs did she do?
“Hmph!” Lyra turned her back on Starlight and reached up to the spaceship with open forelegs. “Oh, great aliens! Show us your wisdom! Vanquish us from this sinister planet to the paradise of Earth!”
A beam of light shot down from the UFO to the ground, covering the landing spot Lyra cleared out. From it, a single silhouette floated down to the ground. Once the alien landed, the beam vanished and the spaceship flew back high enough to be merely a star.
Lyra could see what she’d waited so long for.
It was a human! An actual, factual human just like in all those visions she had and all those fanfics she’d written. She couldn’t help but jump up and down in excitement.
“So, uh, hey!” The human waved to them all. “My name is Karl. I’m the, uh, the alien you’ve been talking to.”
“Karl!” Lyra opened her forelegs wide and looked up to the sky.
“Karl! Karl! Karl! Karl!” Lyra’s followers began chanting.
Karl looked around uncomfortably as they all continued to chant his name in reverence.
“Uh. Yeah! Hello.” Karl nodded again. “Yep. That’s me. Karl.”
“Do you see?!” Lyra called out to all the other ponies, especially Starlight. “The aliens truly were real! If they can tear through countless lightyears in mere seconds, then they can do anything! All of our hopes and dreams will be fulfilled when they bring us back to Earth where there is no pain or strife!”
“Well, yeah.” Karl scratched the back of his head and cleared his throat. “About that.”
Lyra’s eye twitched. She briefly froze in place before stepping back to be next to Karl.
“Karl?” Lyra harshly whispered up at him. “You weren’t exaggerating about how good Earth is, were you? At least tell me that Earth is marginally better than this place. I can work with that.”
“Oh, no. Earth is an unmitigated paradise,” Karl assured the crowd. “Humanity evolved beyond all of our petty differences and hatreds. There is no more war, poverty, or disease. Only total love and understanding between all people. Earth’s technology is such that death is completely optional, and you can have any paradise you can imagine. You can enter into any virtual world you want or just convert your being into pure bliss. Whatever you want.”
“Right!” Lyra pointed to the stars. “So let’s go there! Like right now. What are we waiting for? This planet has zombies on it, Karl.”
“So the catch is, uh,” Karl sighed one more time before coming out with it. “We can’t get to Earth? It’s too far away.”
“What?!” Lyra pointed at the spaceships, keeping her eyes deadlocked on Karl. “No! You have a spaceship right there! I just saw it two seconds ago! Don’t try to gaslight me!”
“Yeah, but that’s a generation ship. It travels at half the speed of light and Earth is 50,000 light-years away. Right? So it’d take 100,000 years to get back there. We’ve been flying all over the galaxy for countless generations looking for an inhabitable planet and this looks like the only other one. We can fly into space, but there’s nowhere to go.”
“But— but then—"
“Yeah, if we turned back, it’d be our distant descendants who got to Earth. And when I say distant, I mean, incredibly distant.” Karl held up his hand. “Like we didn’t have four fingers when we left Earth.”
“What?” Lyra shook her head in disgust. “But that’s so— so—“
“Boring? Yeah.” Karl nodded. “But that’s what actual, real-world space travel is like. It’s just sitting around doing nothing for multiple lifetimes. Other than the two planets, there’s nothing else to see but stupid rocks and fireballs. It’s not a fun adventure at all. Just sucks. That’s why we’re staying here.”
The few ponies around them that weren’t stunned were muttering nervous doubts now.
“Okay.” Lyra took a deep breath. There still had to be some way to salvage this. “But you came from a planet with incredible technology, right? Don’t you have the ability to stop aging? Cure diseases? Or do any of that other stuff you mentioned?”
“Yeah, no.” Karl shook his head sadly. “We don’t have any of that cool stuff. Just the spaceship and the nukes.”
“What?”
“So it’s like this. Right before the technological singularity hit there was an election and our ancestors were so upset their guy lost that they literally left the planet,” Karl explained. “Kind of impressive they went through with it. But once they started, they were too proud to admit the other guy was right about turning on the AI. All the other humans just laughed at us as we slowly drifted out of their light cone.”
“Then what? You’re the laughingstock of your planet? And you came all this way just to tell me how much you suck?!”
“Hey, I’m not— okay maybe we were the laughingstock of the planet at the time but they probably stopped laughing sometime in the last hundred thousand years,” said Karl, then he added upon seeing Lyra grow even more irate. “That said, I do have a plan.”
“Oh?” Lyra raised an eyebrow. Even she was skeptical at this point.
“Yeah. Thanks to the miracle of orbital bombardment, we can easily conquer this planet,” Karl assured them. “We can exploit you guys for cheap labor and become billionaires.”
“So I build you this waypoint and you just come in and force me to work in your sweatshop?” Lyra asked. “You’re gonna do me up like that?”
He was just begging for Lyra to sic Starlight on him now!
“No, no, my minty little friend.” Karl snapped and pointed at Lyra. “See, we’re gonna need patsies on the inside. You and your friends will be on the inside lording over the rest of your planet with us. With our nukes, we’ll create a paradise where 0.1% of the population controls 99.9% of the wealth. We’re all gonna be billionaires! Spending thirty years stuck in a box will finally be worth it.”
So escaping to party on a magical fantasy land in space and enslaving her own species were two slightly different courses of action. Maybe Lyra could convince her cult they weren’t?
“Um.” Lyra turned around to her followers, smiling, hoping to somehow salvage this. “You see? We’re all going to be rich and rule the world! How great is that? It’ll be like we’re in heaven! Exactly what I promised! Hurray!”
They all muttered among themselves as Lyra nervously sweated.
“But you said it’d be literal heaven,” one of her followers complained. “Literally in the sky and everything.”
“When I said that I didn’t mean the literal definition of literal, I mean the metaphorical definition of literal,” said Lyra. “So this is exactly what I promised you.”
“But I wanted a socialist paradise, not a libertarian one,” another complained. “You said that money was responsible for all evil, even volcanoes and earthquakes somehow. That’s why we needed to give all of it to you and move out to your commune where you had total control over our lives. Becoming billionaires goes completely against everything you taught us, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, well that was before I realized I could become a billionaire! Socialists are just people who don’t think they have a shot at becoming rich! Come on! Billionaires!” Lyra started chanting. “Billionaires! Billionaires!”
Lyra was too invested in this whole alien thing to back out now and she knew all of her followers were too. The others were reluctant at first, but after a few seconds one of them started muttering along with her, then two began chanting.
The momentum kept picking up until everypony was cheering with enthusiasm. Everypony but Starlight and Void, who remained unmoved.
The joke was on her, though! Lyra would still settle for being the richest pony on the planet.
“Cute!” Starlight shouted over the rest of them, stopping the chant and getting everyone to turn to her. “But your plan has one flaw in it, Karl.”
“And what’s that?” Karl asked.
“Me.” Starlight finally got up and started trotting towards him. The few cult members that were in her way scrambled to get out like an ursa was stomping through. “See, this is my planet and I don’t feel like letting you enslave anyone right now. Maybe you should go back to space? You might end up wishing you were all alone in a cold, dark void if you don’t.”
Everypony was shaking in fear now, save Karl who merely looked down at the tiny pony, utterly baffled.
“You?” Karl knelt to look at her. “No offense, but you’re kinda small. I could probably just kick you.”
“Pst!” Lyra beckoned Karl to bend down so she could whisper to him. “That’s Starlight Glimmer! She’s in league with the outer gods and she’s nearly unstoppable! I don’t know which definition of alien wins out so be careful.”
“The outer what?” Karl shook his head and stood up. “Oh yeah, I forgot you guys still think magic, ghosts, and gods exist! Look, whatever wonky horse religion you believe in won’t save you from nukes. We don’t have to land on the planet and fight you with knives, okay? We can shoot you from space with bombs that can obliterate entire cities.”
Starlight started to laugh.
“I hope for your sake you weren’t trying to intimidate me with that,” said Starlight. “Compared to what I’ve seen in the outer realm, a bomb that can destroy a city doesn’t frighten me. You have three options. You can go back to where you came from, bow down and swear your loyalty to me, or you can all die. If you try using any of those weapons against me, I’ll just go ahead and assume you picked the last option.”
“Okay, that’s a bluff.” Karl shook his head. “Guess I’ll shoot you with the orbital laser cannon.”
“Go ahead,” Starlight invited him. “If you think you know anything. If you think all of your reason and science are anything but pleasant fantasies you’ve made for yourself then go ahead and attack me.”
Karl rolled his eyes and put a finger to his ear.
“Okay, Steve.” Karl pointed his free hand to Starlight. “We gotta make an example. Can you gun this horse looking thing down?”
A magnificent ray of pure white light, lightning crackling all around it, fired down from the spaceship to Starlight Glimmer. The force of the impact was incredible! Lyra felt it through the ground even yards away. It sent convulsions through her body before throwing her into the air.
The blinding laser ended after just a few seconds, but Lyra needed a minute to drag herself back to her hooves. All around her, the ponies in her cult were still on the ground, knocked out without even having a direct hit. Lyra herself felt too injured to walk half a mile after that.
But could that seriously be enough to take out Starlight?
She gulped and turned her head to where Starlight had been, knowing this was her only hope. At the spot it had hit was now a crater. A ten-foot hole was in the ground filled with melted rocks, glowing red.
Yet Starlight was unharmed. She was simply standing there, in midair over the crater with the same condescending smile. Not even destroying the ground beneath her was enough to budge her.
Karl stared forward in disbelief, beginning to realize he may have just made a mistake.
“Okay.” Karl stepped back, worry staring into his voice. “That’s not good. Hey, Steve. We might have to resort to nukes sooner than I expected.”
There was a pause and an increasingly worried look on Karl’s face.
“Steve?” Karl’s eyes only widened further. “Steve? Steve?!”
“Steve is dead, Karl.” Smiling, Starlight started to walk forward until she was on solid ground again.
“W-wuh?”
Karl and Lyra looked up to the sky, where the artificial star hung. It began growing large again, but this time it turned red as it grew. Soon it was a small fireball in the sky, coming down like a comet.
The fire comet came down faster than the speed of sound and crashed into the distant mountainside with an explosion that was visible even from this distance. Then Karl was the only human left in the solar system.
“But! But what?!” Karl stumbled back, falling on his butt. “How could you have possibly done that?! What the hell is this?!”
Starlight closed her eyes. All the stars in the sky turned red.
Karl started backing away from her, dragging himself backward with his arms, until he bumped up against Lyra.
“Uh. Lyra? What the hell is happening?” Karl looked down at her.
“You’re the one with the spaceship, Karl! You tell me!”
Then the stars began to bleed, red light coming down like a beam as though every star was a bloody stab wound in the sky. Starlight began to glow with an eldritch light that in some indescribably way made the mountain clearing both brighter and darker at the same time.
Lyra was convinced that no pony could have stood there and not known what horror was about to befall them. She jumped into Karl’s arms and the two of them screamed and screamed as they held one another.
The spaceship crashed on a mountainside to the west, a red glow lighting up the horizon. Without having to check, Starlight knew there were no survivors. That’s just what happened when you tried to conquer Starlight’s world. And it was her world.
Lyra collapsed onto her back; eyes turned into the back of her head as she foamed heavily at the mouth. Even after doing this so many times, Starlight still wasn’t sure where all that foam came from.
Starlight gave her a poke or two to make sure she was completely unresponsive. Lyra’s mind was completely destroyed at present, but Starlight knew from personal experience it could be rebuilt. Maybe she could be useful later.
The other members of Lyra’s cult were no better. That alien, the only survivor of his species on this planet, was presently a vegetable. A pony mind Starlight could reconstruct. It probably wasn’t worth attempting to do it for an alien.
“We can take the last alien to Area 5X.” Starlight gave it a poke too. “It would be interesting to have an actual alien there for a change.”
“Peradventure we shouldn’t have actually blown that thing up?” Void Walker suggested too late. “We may have learned something.”
“Oh, Void. You should know by now that the only thing you can ever learn is that you know nothing,” said Starlight. “But if you want to have somepony look through the wreckage, knock yourself out.”
Starlight shook her head at the defeated alien. It seemed there was hardly anypony who could challenge her anymore. How underwhelming. It was times like these she whished she was back in the outer realm.
“So much for the alien invasion.” Starlight flicked her mane. “That was the last wild card I had to worry about too. Every other threat has been accounted for. As long as nopony unexpected shows up, this should all end up being pretty boring, huh?”
“Ahem!” Void Walker cleared his throat. “Speaking of unexpected ponies showing up, my mistress.”
Void bowed to Starlight who groaned and rolled her eyes.
“What is it?”
“I didn’t want to trouble you until the alien invasion was taken care of. Sunset Shimmer has just nominated a particular individual for rank S.”
“So?” Starlight whipped around, annoyed. “Find some stupid excuse to object. We can easily drag this out for a year even if we can’t stop it. I shouldn’t have to tell you this.”
“Sadly, it isn’t such a nonissue as that.” Void Walker shook his head. “You see, this ‘Rainbow T. Dash’ as it calls itself, has defeated a witch.”
Starlight grew grimly quiet. Of course somepony like that would show up right now of all times!
They couldn’t object to her promotion. Objecting would only make them look petty and jealous. But doing nothing would dampen one of Starlight’s biggest claims to divinity. If another pony could defeat a witch, it meant Starlight wasn’t that special after all in the eyes of the public.
Where did this pony even come from? Starlight had her servants spend three freaking years compiling a list of every single entity on the entire planet who could possibly be a threat to her. Starlight memorized every single pony on that list. There was no ‘Rainbow T. Dash’. How did they miss a pony capable of taking down a witch?! They caught the aliens but not her?
Every last pony who worked on that project was getting fired and severely reprimanded on top of that!
“Of course she didn’t do it alone, so it hardly compares to the resplendence of your miracles.” Void bowed slightly to her. “Enough of an excuse to keep the idiots following along. The other one was some idiot pirate who was stumbling all over herself when I saw her. In my estimation, Rainbow Dash is the greater threat between the two. How would you like me to ‘mitigate’ this threat?”
Starlight calmed herself down. Maybe this wasn’t as big a deal as she thought. She’d dealt with monsters and ponies as strong as witches before. She’d dealt with information contradicting her story before. All this meant was that one threat was replaced by a new threat.
This mystery pony might even be useful to her in the end.
“Why don’t we start by giving her a free personality test?” Starlight smiled at him, back to her confident airs. “I want you to give her absolutely everything she ever wanted! And more!”
Bonbon used a dark window as her mirror. She turned her fancy jacket inside out, converting it from an expensive black and white to a cheap, almost grody hoodie. She ran a comb through her mane, twisting it upwards with each stroke until her white and pink mane returned to its normal curls.
Already she was a different mare. If anypony saw her enter this area, they’d see a different pony leave.
With that taken care of, Bonbon slipped through the window she’d been using as a mirror.
Their ‘office’ changed every couple of days given how paranoid Nailbat was. Rarely did they get to work in a place anypony would ever want to stay. Today, Nailbat was holed up in an abandoned factory, surrounded by rusted-out machinery nopony thought valuable enough to move. It was always a place like that, save when they were lucky enough to head up north.
“Trixie has been eliminated.” Bonbon produced the newspaper for Nailbat. “And it wasn’t Flash Bang. Some random pony no one’s ever heard of just showed up and beat her up at the last second.”
Nailbat was looking rough as ever, lying still on his back in a pile of crumpled up, yet no doubt important, papers. Few ponies ever saw him without his hoodie and its enchanted face-hiding effect. Bonbon suspected that a tenth the population could tell you his fur color. Hell, helf the population might not even know he was a pegasus.
As it stood, he was three shades of green. His mane making up the darker two shades, arranged in a double striped pattern like the rest of his accursed family.
There was a reason Nailbat always wore clothes from head to tail. It wasn’t that he had some secret identity, but rather that it was the only way he could look cool.
There was no way to sugarcoat it. The guy looked ugly.
A disease he had when he was young left him looking like he had mange. Large splotches of his fur were missing, and skin underneath was grey and scabby. His jaw was crooked and one of his ears missing. If the bags under his eyes were any worse, it’d look like he had two black eyes on top of all that.
He didn’t even turn his head when Bonbon barged in. It may have been days since he last slept.
“The good and bad news is that Flash Bang will be completely humiliated by this.” Bonbon smacked Dash’s. “It was a rank D slayer who upstaged her entire army, too. Flash Bang was absolutely seething when I last saw her.”
Nailbat stayed on his back, staring up blankly at the ceiling. A normal pony might have thought he was totally out of it, broken by exhaustion. Bonbon knew that guy had a hundred scenarios running through his mind at all times, even when he was zoned out. There was something about this he didn’t like.
“I honestly thought you’d be happier about this.” Bonbon held the paper down near the ground so it was at eye level with Nailbat. “’Rainbow Dash’ is going to be promoted to S rank for sure. I think she’ll be mostly sympathetic to our aims.”
Nailbat turned his head to glance briefly at the picture of Rainbow Dash before groaning and knocking it out of the way.
“It’s a good thing I’m the only one who reads my own mail.” Nailbat sat up and tried to shake some of the weariness out of his head.
“You’re losing me,” said Bonbon.
“I had everything figured out too.” Nailbat got up and put his hoodie on. “Now Starlight’s going to go off the rails, even if she doesn’t figure it out. What a pain. Oh, and don’t tell anypony else about this, not even our friends. I don’t need to tell you what will happen if this gets out.”
“It’s in the newspaper.” Bonbon held the paper back up. “I’m pretty sure it already got out.”
“Not that part you idiot.” Nailbat got out the chain and started strapping his bat to his foreleg.
Bonbon stepped back. That bat was worse than any bomb Bonbon could make.
This was another thing Bonbon didn’t like about Nailbat. He always assumed you followed his every thought and got frustrated when you couldn’t keep up with him. Already he was walking towards the door, ready to ditch Bonbon.
“Do I get a clue this time or not?” Bonbon called after him
“Huh?” Nailbat turned back to Bonbon briefly. “Oh. I guess I should spell it out. I’m not sure yet but that other pony with Rainbow Dash is probably the witch Twilight Sparkle in disguise.”
“What?!”
“Anyway.” Nailbat put his hood on. His face was shrouded by darkness and only his two red eyes were visible again. “If I die, you’ll have to do something without my help for once. Later.”
Then he closed the door behind him without another word.
Bonbon knew he was smart but this was too much. How could you possibly figure that out from just Dash’s picture?
She picked the newspaper back up. Rainbow Dash was on one page and Silverstorm was on the opposite page. Folded like this, Nailbat wouldn’t have even been able to see Silverstorm. If he’d guessed that without even looking at her, there couldn’t be a flaw with the alleged disguise. There was something about Rainbow Dash that made him suspicious.
But what? Bonbon looked at that picture for a solid half-hour but couldn’t find whatever Nailbat did.
In a world where everypony was a sexy pegasus and had a ponysona, two sexy pegasi stood atop the capital building to duel. One of them was Laser Blade, the white-haired pegasus as slender as he was sexy. Baron Von King was his opponent, easily twice his size, wearing a tight and sexy suit.
“But I’m the main political rival of the pony who killed your father,” said Baron Von King. “Like you, I’ve devoted my entire life to destroying him. Fighting me doesn’t make any sense. I think we should talk, at least briefly, before we fight to the death.”
“Heh!” Laser Blade cocked a smile. “You expect me to negotiate? Politics suck! You all suck! Everypony in the government sucks! I blame the political opponents of the ponies who killed my father just as much as I blame the actual murderers! Talking is dumb; fighting is awesome!”
Laser Blade summoned his ponysona. It was a pegasus with wings made of laser swords!
“Then so be it.” Baron summoned his own Ponysona, a skeletal pony with black mist dripping from every gap in his bones to give the illusion of a full pony. “But before I kill you, allow me to explain in detail what the power of my ponysona, Dark Miasma, does!”
“Yeah! Finally!”
This was so awesome!
Screwball leaned forward, mouth agape with excitement to the point her lollipop nearly fell out. The five bells attached to her witches hat jingled. She sat upon a throne of plushies while Feather Bangs, a dusty brown pegasus, the sexiest from her pegasus harem, cuddled up next to her.
The pony she’d forced to write this sat off to the side, chained to the wall by a collar around his neck. He was watching for Screwball’s reaction more than the actual cartoon itself, knowing the entire team would be punished if she didn’t like it. If Screwball wasn’t entertained by this, she’d find some other way to have fun and he’d be directly responsible for whatever happened.
This was so much better than the original version he’d written.
Cartoons these days had gotten way too political. ‘Oh! Let’s make every cartoon about [insert current political issue]!’ said some stupid ad executive! It got so bad that the only way to save the art form was for Screwball to literally kidnap an entire animation studio and bring them here to Endless Paradis Island where they’d be her story-making slaves.
No longer did she have to worry about a show suddenly going to crap in its eighth season. No longer did she need to lie awake at night worried that a good cartoon would get canceled. Now she could just force her slaves to make any show on demand, remake entire seasons of a show if she didn’t like how it turned out.
And it was awesome!
It was such a wonderful idea that she kidnapped all sorts of artists after that. Musicians, architects, sculptors, mad scientists, and more were all brought to her eternal carnival! None of them got to choose if they came here, but infinite pleasure awaited the ones who submitted to her.
Depending on what you were into, Endless Paradise was either its namesake or an absolute nightmare but never anything in between. For Screwball, of course, it was the former.
Screwball had everything she could ever want and more.
The amount of wealth in this one room alone would make kings, dragons, and CEOs blush. Screwball herself wore thirty necklaces, all with gold chains and dripping with the rarest stones. She had seven crowns on her right foreleg worn like bracelets and one more on her head. Some of those would be enough for a normal pony to retire on!
The room had three thrones in it. One was made of solid gold, the second a more makeshift throne made of hundred-bit bills and the final was more of a pile made of Screwball’s custom plushies. Life-changing amounts of paper money were thrown about carelessly and covered most of the floor in this building.
She just threw stacks of hundred-bit bills out the window sometimes. If you just ran around Endless Paradise picking up stray bills and discarded gold coins you’d be rich before lunch.
There were some things you hadn’t lived until you’ve done. Making snow angels in a pile of cash worth millions was one of them. Burning said pile of cash in front of a group of orphans was another.
And the money wasn’t even the beginning of it. She had her pegasus harem, a legion of slaves, the largest palace in the world, the largest amusement park with the best version of every ride, a small armada of ships from the pirates who remained loyal to her family to the yachts she had built, and of course the trove of magical artifacts her father collected over his lifetime.
What could possibly ruin this?
Minuette. Minuette could ruin it and what’s more, she did so just then.
One of her signature portals opened into the room and the drown-pony furred, toothpaste-haired annoyance barged into the room. She was literally the only pony who had that ability and it pissed Screwball off to no end.
She wore the hat of a witch with five bells attached, the highest amount since the last masters died. She had one of Twilight’s spellbooks, even if it was the worst one. As a witch herself, Screwball had to restrain her urge to break this pony’s neck.
To point out Minuette was panicking was like pointing out she was breathing. But today she did seem especially flighty.
“Screwball!” Minuette was doing a little jog in place like she was prepared to run at any moment. A good idea, given where she was. “There’s something I need to tell you!”
“How many times do I have to tell you that I hate politics?!” Screwball took her lollipop out of her mouth and threw it at Minuette. The sticky candy stuck to her mane. “If you’re not here to tell me a joke or sing me a song then get out!”
“This is important.” Minuette grabbed the lollipop and tried to pull it out.
“That’s what politicians say!” Screwball shot Feather Bangs a dirty look. “Why aren’t you throwing lollipops at her!”
“Was I supposed to, Babe?” He straightened up. He picked up some lollipops from the ground. He began to lick them, then throw them at Minuette, causing them to stick to her fur.
Minuette shuddered in disgust but accepted her horrible fate to press on.
“Trixie was defeated,” said Minuette. “It wasn’t an army that took her, but just two ponies!”
“Are they hot?” Screwball leaned back into her plushie throne.
“They’re both mares,” said Minuette.
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Mistress Screwball is a pegasexual,” Feather Bangs explained while Screwball nodded. “She’s attracted to pegasi of any gender but only pegasi.”
“I don’t care,” said Minuette. Clearly, as an unattractive unicorn, she was jealous of the pegasi. “Don’t you get what a big deal this is?! This is the second time one of us was taken out in the last fifteen years! It’s like I keep telling you. We’re falling behind and the rest of the world is catching up to us. Hey! Are you listening?!”
This whole time Screwball had been flapping her mouth open and shut in mock imitation of Minuette.
“Nope!” Screwball leaned back and put a foreleg around her boy toy. “How does this affect me?”
“Because there are now multiple ponies out there capable of defeating a witch!” Minuette pointed to the window. It was a large one, ceiling to floor made of solid diamond. “They might start hunting us down one by one!”
“First of all, just because you can kill Trixie doesn’t mean you can kill me.” Screwball considered three places to be invincible strongholds. There was Area 5X, Crater Cemetery, and Endless Paradise Island. Attacking any of those places was a far bigger challenge than defeating a witch. “Second, why the crow would they go after a second witch, huh?”
“Because everypony hates us and wants us dead?” Minuette reminded her.
“Did Starlight go on a rampage hunting us down?” Minuette asked. “Nah! Cause she doesn’t want to risk it. One witch is good enough. You get infinite fame and wealth for that. One thing I know is that money corrupts. There isn’t a single pony who doesn’t lose all their morals the second they get some money. They’ll forget about whatever hero game they’re playing once they see how good they have it now.”
Minuette, now with twenty lollipops in her fur and ten in her mane, continued to panic. She desperately tried to think of something that might convince Screwball to attack this pony.
“One of them is Silverstorm,” Minuette explained. “She’s one of Bloodstorm’s kids! She’s your sister.”
“Oh, wow!” Screwball sat up with mock attention, putting as much sarcasm into her voice as possible. “You mean I finally get to meet one of my ten million half-sisters? Like I can’t go to the grocery store and get a six-pack of those whenever I feel like it?”
No doubt Minuette hoped that’d convince her to go kill this pony. It wasn’t like Screwball couldn’t allow any of her family to exist. She let them do whatever they wanted for the most part. If they ever claimed to be anything more than a bastard or claimed that her dad loved them, that was when they asked for a gruesome death.
Daddy only loved Screwball. Anypony who questioned it died so that was as true as things got.
“If she’s claiming to be one of Daddy’s legitimate kids then sure. I’ll get my whole gang together and we’ll go kill her and everyone who so much as gave her a haircut,” said Screwball. “But if she was doing that you would have come in here yelling about that to begin with.”
Minuette’s eyes darted around the room in desperation. Whether she was looking for an escape route or another argument was hard to tell.
“Th-think about it!” Minuette dared to take a step closer. “Things will keep getting worse for us at the rate things are going. We have to come up with a plan, right?”
Screwball rolled her eyes. Here it came! Here she was about to start vomiting about her ‘Operation Dark Ages’ plan.
“We need to all come together to push forward Operation Dark Ages! If we can—"
“No!” Screwball shoved her pegasus pet to the side and got up. She stormed up to Minuette and got in her face. “Gah! How many times do I have to tell you that I hate politics?!”
“This isn’t about politics!” Minuette, now covered in lollipops, tried pulling some of the candy out of her hair while she stepped back. “This is a matter of survival.”
“That’s what politicians say you asshole!” Screwball jabbed her hoof against Minuette’s chest. “You have five minutes to get off my island before I murder you!”
Minuette let out an ‘eep’ and ran away like the chicken she was. Still, she was an uncatchable chicken. Now way even Screwball could catch her.
With a ‘hmph’ Screwball sat down and put a fresh lollipop in her mouth. Now her whole day was ruined yet again by the insufferable Minuette.
Feather Bangs looked at her with concern.
“You sure we got nothing to worry about?” he asked her.
“We just don’t do any crazy stuff for two months and it’ll blow over,” said Screwball.
“Aw, that’s too bad babe.” Feather Bangs nuzzled her. “I love it when you do crazy stuff!”
Screwball frowned at him and his disappointment. It was so hard to not give her little pet what he wanted! Frankly Screwball loved the chaos too. “You know what? What the crow I’ll do it anyway!”
Screwball pointed her lollipop at the writer in the corner.
“Hey, you! You write horror stories, yeah? I’m making you come up with a bunch of messed-up ways I can screw with these ponies. Oh! And make up a cool backstory for me to pretend to have. Better not be something lazy like ‘I’m racist’ either.”
She felt a little better now. This should be fun!
Scootaloo tugged her overflowing wagon through the heart of Manehattan. Buildings towered over her in every direction, meaning there was an endless number of places to watch her from. Maybe she shouldn’t stay in a city.
No! She couldn’t let herself get scared. That’d only prove them right about all the crap they used to say to her.
‘If we let you go outside you might get overstimulated.’
‘Sorry, no radio. Something on it might stimulate you too much.’
‘No, no! Comic books that are too exciting. Even reading can be too stimulating for you.’
They kept telling her that and yet here she was, in the middle of the city and Scootaloo was perfectly fine. Heck, this place wasn’t stimulating at all. Scootaloo was the least stimulated pony on the entire planet right now!
It wasn’t like she had anything to worry about. Scootaloo spent most of her time staying in big hotel rooms reading her new stash of comic books. She could make all the food she wanted.
Sure, there were a lot of ponies around but Scootaloo learned that if she acted like she knew where she was going none of them would bother her. Though even still, she couldn’t help but watch everypony she passed with suspicion.
Those guys had to have some sort of weapons that could stop Scootaloo. Maybe they would even send Lily Moon after her if they got desperate enough.
She’d gone into a store and convinced the pony working there to give her some stuff. She had a dark, blue jacket on to hide her bright orange fur for one. A pair of headphones and a backward baseball cap hid her mane. Finally, she’d cut her tail short enough that it’d fit underneath the skirt she took.
But maybe this was too much clothes? It was pretty hot under all this stuff. Most of the other ponies around here were nude or wearing a hat at best.
Her watch vibrated, another thing she borrowed. It did that every eight hours to remind her to take her medicine.
She moved her wagon off to the side, glanced around, then lifted the piece of cloth on top. She made it look like it was just a pile of laundry, but underneath was a pile of pills, easily more than Scootaloo’s weight in them. She quickly took out one of the blue pills and covered the rest back up.
That was another thing. They always made her take the wrong amount of medicine! Scootaloo was the only one who actually took the stuff so she knew better than those scientists how much she needed. She needed to take three of the blue ones through the day and one yellow one before she went to sleep. As long as she did that, she was felt great and there weren’t any accidents.
Scootaloo looked at the blue pill in her right hoof. She tried once more to make a copy of it. A blue pill did appear in her left. She knew her attempt failed just by putting it in her mouth. The blue ones made her fur tingle just by touching it to her tongue, but this copy didn’t.
She spat it out and downed the correct one instead.
Why didn’t this ever work?! Was it because she didn’t know what was in them? It wasn’t like she knew all the stuff they put in soda, but she could make that!
Scootaloo swiped her hoof in the air and a cup of soda, complete with a straw, appeared in it. She drank it as she continued forward.
That was her main problem. She knew she’d be fine as long as didn’t run out. She could always get away from the grown-ups, make as much food as she wanted and sleep in a luxury hotel every night. But as soon as she ran out of medicine…
How many were in this sack? A thousand? A million? Probably closer to a thousand.
If she had ten thousand, how many years did that give her? Scootaloo sucked too much at math to figure that one out.
Either way, she had a hard time limit to figure things out before the bad times came.
Scootaloo closed her eyes and groaned as she kept walking. Getting out of there seemed like such an impossible goal that she never planned on what she should do afterward. That’d be like planning on what you’d do if you ever found out you were the princess of the moon ponies.
Honestly, she just wanted to sit in a room and read comic books all day but apparently that was too much to ask.
Stupid grown-ups! They only cared about money. Nopony like the good guys in her comic books existed, just greedy adults.
Still, she kept her eyes open, glancing around like she might just bump into the answer.
While she didn’t find the solution, she did find something interesting. A radio was playing at a banana stall loudly enough for her to hear the newscast.
That was another one of those things Scootaloo was never allowed to have. Of course, she went up to listen to it.
“We finally get to talk to Rainbow Trouble Dash,” the guy on the radio began. “Who may very well be the next Starlight Glimmer. You two are the first to defeat a witch with no real assistance.”
“Wait. Did he just say this pony defeated a witch?” Scootaloo asked the guy running the banana stand.
“How have you not heard about that?” the guy asked. “Rainbow Dash and Silverstorm defeated a witch and recovered one of their spellbooks. The news hasn’t talked about anything else for weeks.”
“But aren’t witches like invincible or something?” Scootaloo looked at the radio with growing amazement.
“Looks like this one wasn’t.” He shrugged.
Even locked up all day, Scootaloo knew what a big deal taking down a witch was. That wasn’t something a normal pony could ever hope to do. It was almost synonymous with the impossible. It was the sort of thing that only happened in comic books.
Now she was imagining this ‘Rainbow Dash’ looking like Firefly in her head. Firefly was her favorite one. She was always talking about kicking reality to the curb and doing the impossible! That was what inspired Scootaloo to try escaping despite it seeming impossible. Maybe that was why they never wanted her reading those.
Could someone like Firefly really exist?
No, of course not! There weren’t any actual heroes, Scootaloo deflated herself by remembering. Adults only cared about money. They’d do anything for money no matter how evil! Dash couldn’t be any different.
The radio began to hiss and rapidly change stations, snapping Scootaloo back to reality. She’d accidentally gotten mad at it and lost focus!
The store owner banged on it a few times, concluding that it’d worked when Scootaloo set it back to normal a second later.
“And what do you think, Silverstorm?” the host asked the other pony. Scootaloo missed part of the interview.
“Oh!” The other pony on the team stammered before giving an awkward reply. “I, uh. I agree with Rainbow Dash. Yes.”
“That’s starting to look like your new catchphrase, huh?” the host joked. “One of us needs to put ‘I agree with Rainbow Dash’ on a T-shirt.”
This other one didn’t seem so impressive. Silverstorm? Meh.
“Well since it’s safe to assume Silverstorm agrees with you, let’s ask Rainbow Dash this next one,” the host went on. “You did stir up a good deal of controversy by advocating to keep Trixie out of Area 5X. You could argue that justice demands a much worse punishment for all the horrible things she’s done. Is it a good idea for you to make such a controversial move given this is essentially your public debut?”
“Well, to be frank, I plan on stirring up way more controversy than that,” Dash replied with confidence. “I don’t think a harsher punishment for Trixie will help anypony, but making her work will. Maybe I could have gotten more money and fame if I threw her under the bus but that’s not my style. I believe ponies can change and I think what you are doesn’t make you evil. You know, like if hypothetically there was a witch who never did anything bad we should just leave them alone!”
“Yeah!” The other one added. “I-I agree with Rainbow Dash!”
That wasn’t anything like what Snap would say. Heck, it wasn’t like anything any adult she knew would say. To Scootaloo, that was even more like something out of a comic book.
Firefly always became instant best friends with everyone she beat up too!
And now her wings were flaring out in excitement again. She had to remind herself that this was probably just a lie.
Still… maybe Scootaloo should go see if Rainbow Dash really was a hero. Even if she was another fake, maybe Scootaloo could still use her.
She grabbed the radio and put it in her cart, deciding she wanted to listen to this pony some more.
“You know you gotta pay for that right?” the store owner asked. “Also it’s not for sale. The store’s not ‘Bananas and Radios’.”
“No. This is my radio, remember?” Scootaloo pointed to her name written on the side. Making herself the guy's niece for a few minutes wouldn't be much work. “I was just letting you borrow it.”
“What?” He blinked, then hit himself in embarrassment. “I can’t believe I forget. Sorry, bout that. And thanks for letting me borrow it. Come back and visit your uncle sometime, huh?”
“Yeah, no problem, Uncle!” Scootaloo waved and sped off with her new radio.
The antenna was taped on now. Scootaloo needed to take better care of her things.
Just after dark, a lone pegasus walked along the edge of Ponyville towards the small collection of apartment buildings on its far northern side. She kept her head deep under the hood of her dark crimson hoodie as she came up to the main building.
She knocked once on the door to the office, then checked behind her to make sure nothing was watching. Her eyes, in the dark, were keen enough that nothing would have escaped them.
The door cracked open, and a disgruntled stallion grumbled something that may have been a question at her.
“Hi!” Sonata Dusk took down her hood and smiled, revealing her blue fur and mane. Bright as it was inside the building, she could only make out his shadow. “Does Rainbow T. Dash live here? I need to talk to her.”
The guy just screamed in frustration and slammed the door.
“Is that a no?” Sonata called after him.
No reply. She checked the address and this was it.
She knocked again.
She kept knocking for ten minutes straight.
Finally, he threw the door open once more with a yell just as frustrated as the one he closed it with.
“What?! Are you here to torment me too? Rainbow Dash ain’t here! I kicked her out months ago.” The landlord leaned forward, his face close enough that Sonata could almost make out the features now. “And you know what? Even now I feel like I should have kicked her out years ago instead!”
“Well do you know where I can find her then?” Sonata asked.
“Where can you find her?!” He let out a single, harsh laugh. “Where the crow can’t you find her?!”
And then he slammed the door in her face. Was that supposed to be some kind of riddle? Sonata scratched her head but that joke or whatever it was had simply gone over her.
“Sonata good day.” She sighed and drew her hoodie back up as she turned to leave. “That was my only lead too!”
She’d gotten so hyped up about that one only for it to turn out to be nothing yet again.
First, she spent a whole month crawling through the sewers around here and finding nothing. Then she heard somepony noticed an aura of fear near Twilight Lake. She searched all around the lake and up and down the river. All she found was a few pumpkins and a psycho zombie sealed away in the lake. No specter anywhere.
Why did Sonata always get stuck with hard missions like this? She wasn’t a detective! But somehow her mistress decided she was the one who had to solve the mystery of the missing specter.
There was a whole gang of train ghosts that Crater Cemetery managed to capture not too long ago. When questioned, they told Sonata’s mistress about a specter who lived down in the sewers with them before chasing them away.
She knew the specter’s name at least. It was ‘Fluttershy’. The only other information she had was that Fluttershy likely left somewhere with a pony name ‘Rainbow T. Dash’ and two others who were ridiculously tough. Eventually, she got this address.
But where had they all gone? Figuring it out wasn’t fun but Sonata knew it had to be done.
Every specter needed to submit to Sonata’s mistress or die. Not one of them could be allowed to exist independently. To have somepony defy her mistress’ will was unthinkable!
Her mistress was the most important thing in the world to Sonata! Nopony should be allowed to resist her will and specters were the only ghosts able to even attempt such a feat. Sonata and her sisters were banshees, close to the top of the ghost tier list. Yet all three of them didn’t even last a single second against her willpower.
Even now, miles away and months since she’d last seen her, Sonata still felt perfectly attuned to her mistress. She saw everything as her mistress did. She saw herself as her mistress saw her at all times – as property, as a tool that existed solely for the convenience of her owner. That was the truth. Sonata existed only to serve her now.
Against something so incredible, only a specter could hope to resist for even a few minutes. Once the number of free specters was low enough, Crater Cemetery could work unopposed to subjugate the predead menace.
Sonata so badly wanted to be a good little tool and do what she was told!
But that didn’t mean she was good at it, especially now that she was alone.
Adagio failed their big, important mission and ended up dead for real. Maybe that one wasn’t so bad. Dagi was always yelling and hitting Sonata for every little thing. Sonata felt a bit of relief that she was dead, to be honest.
But then there was Aria, who Sonata loathed completely right now! It was a shame too since Aria was more the big sister in Sonata’s life. She used to like her, at least. But then Pinkie Pie appeared to ruin Sonata’s life once again! During the assassination attempt, Pinkie destroyed all the chains binding Aria.
That meant she was free from their rightful owner’s will. Aria just betrayed them and ran off somewhere instead of turning herself in to be chained back up again. Sonata’s mistress hated her so much for that and now Sonata hated her too! This was far worse than her simply dying!
If Sonata ever saw her or Pinkie Pie again!
Well, realistically she’d run away crying. At this point, it was clear she had a genetic predisposition to getting killed by Pinkie. Better not risk it.
“I’ll ask around tomorrow!” Sonata declared to the night sky. “I’m too depressed to do it tonight.”
She was just gonna go down to the convenience store and drown her sorrow with soda for now.
With her taxidermized body she couldn’t drink any soda, but she could swish it around in her mouth and spit it out. You still got the taste that way. Honestly, she had no idea why predeads didn’t just do that and avoid all the sugar.
Sonata used her taxidermized pegasus wings to fly down to the Ponyville convenience store. The store was annoyingly bright so she had to hold the soda bottles close under her hood to read the labels.
Her hoodie wasn’t there to make her look cool or to hide her identity. It was just so she’d have a portable source of darkness to let her read things. Before having this idea, she’d always buy the sugar-free crap by mistake. She swore these electric lights were invented just to annoy poor ghosts like her!
The clerk was hardly a blob on the floor with how little shadows these ceiling lights left. But Sonata could still smell his warm blood. She paid for it and started swishing some soda around in her mouth. The guy was probably looking at her funny now, his heart rate climbed a little.
That made her hungry! She hated it when predead’s hearts started beating faster. It was like they were teasing her. Just being in this town filled her brain with an annoying itch. She had to eat a whole lot before coming to these places just to keep from snapping and freezing one of them.
Even now the temptation was too much! She needed to buy something warm to eat. She put her hood up and so she could at least read the labels. The pizza was the hottest thing there, but it wasn’t nearly hot enough. It’d been heated up by one of those nasty heat lamps too. Even ghosts found convenience store food gross.
Then again, there wasn’t anypony else nearby. Maybe she could give this guy a case of hypothermia real quick and be on her way? Yeah! If he turned out to be cute when the lights were off, she’d even give him a little kiss to thank him. It was always more fun to do this to a boy. Every once in a while they were into it, even.
She knew she had to be careful about this sort of thing. She ducked down to pretend to look at whatever was down there while she smelled around to make sure no ponies were around to interrupt the little ‘date’ they’d be going on and then—
Sonata stood up, holding a magazine just in front of her face. It was hard to make out, but when she did she spat out all of her soda in the guy’s face.
As he yelled and staggered back, trying to wipe the backwash out of his eyes, Sonata pulled it in under her hood to triple check. On the cover of the magazine were a name and a picture matching her target’s description.
‘Rainbow T. Dash.’