They were arguing. Again. Sunny Starscout curled up and rested her chin on her hooves, trying to block out the sound. Surprisingly, hearing villains argue was one of the worst things ever… mostly because they were arguing about her, and how they wanted to use her.
Tirek - the big bulky centaur creature - wanted Sunny dealt with, and she did not want to know what that meant. He thought she was far too dangerous to be left alone.
Chrysalis - the exiled changeling queen - wanted to keep Sunny captive to use as leverage against her friends to keep them from retaliating against the three of them. It had worked once before, so she saw no reason why it wouldn’t work again.
Cozy Glow - the pegasus filly - wanted to mind control Sunny and force her to fight for them and against her friends, saying that it would break their spirits much more effectively.
Neither was winning. Neither was backing down.
So for now, Sunny was chained to the wall in the main room of the villain’s headquarters, where she could get a front row seat to all of their arguments and disagreements and evil planning. They never tried to hide anything from her, and it didn’t matter - she couldn’t tell her friends anyway. And Sunny had been allowed to keep her bag - the “Legion of Doom”, as they liked to be called, had taken out all the contents that they viewed as dangerous: the Journal of Friendship, her father’s research. Without much left to do, Sunny tried to pick up the scattered remains of her life.
It had been revealed to her that the Legion of Doom had cast a spell on her that allowed any one of them - or all of them - to enter her mind. They would have access to everything in there, if Sunny let them, and Cozy Glow spent weeks wearing Sunny down until she was ready to break. Then she called her pals to come and completely take control over her.
All the horrible feelings, the strange thoughts, the memories disappearing, that had all been because of these… creatures. Sunny knew she should be angry, but for some reason, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Was she upset about the whole ordeal? Yes, of course! But she felt like there was more to this than she was seeing. And Sunny had never been a very good pony at getting really, truly angry. There was one exception to this - two exceptions, actually. A pegasus and a unicorn.
The same ponies who had used a memory stone to wipe her friends’ memories of her and all they had accomplished together were here, helping these villains. Sunny remembered that they had done that. She just couldn’t remember what they had accomplished together. Or what happened after that. They must have gotten their memories back, because she had fleeting images of what must have happened after that, and her friends were there.
But there was so much she couldn’t recall, and it broke her heart. She could barely remember her father, her friends, her home…
“All right, enough!” she heard Tierk shout, and Sunny winced at his loud voice. “We can’t proceed with the plan until we figure out what to do about this Sunny Starscout, and we aren’t getting anywhere.” The centaur glared ruefully at the pegasus and the changeling. “I agree that she may still have her uses-”
“-so we make them bargain for her,” Chrysalis interrupted. “They would do anything to get her back - we can make them surrender the kingdom for her return.”
“So we can be back in control of a land with our worst enemies running around on the loose planning to defeat us,” Cozy Glow snorted. “I thought you would have learned your lesson after that didn’t work last time.”
“Obviously we won’t let them run around,” snapped the changeling, “we’ll capture them and hold them captive. But it would save so much time.”
“You’re always the one saying that we should be careful!” Cozy Glow retorted. “Was all that nonsense about being ‘patient’ and ‘good things come to those who wait’ just a bunch of horse feathers so that you could save time at the end?”
Chrysalis growled, and Tirek said, “If we rush things, it will fail. We don’t know what these ponies are capable of, and we can’t take any chances. If we want to use Sunny Starscout as leverage, we will need to keep her with us to make them hesitant to attack us.”
“Or we could just go with my idea,” Cozy Glow offered. “It solves all the problems.”
“I’d rather go to Tartarus than do your idea,” Chrysalis snapped, and the pegasus foal glared at her. “We keep her with us, but chained up.” As if to reinforce her plan, the changeling lit up her horn and yanked on the chains that held Sunny to the stone wall. The earth pony winced, and Chrysalis snarled at the pathetic demonstration.
“Anyway,” Cozy Glow said loudly, bringing the exiled queen’s attention back to the other two villains, “how do we know what’s going on in the world right now?” She reached under her wing and pulled out a small device that Sunny recognized as Pipp’s cell phone. “This thing can only tell us so much.”
Tirek reached under the stone slab that served as a table and pulled out a large ball that looked like a giant eye. He set it on the table and turned to the others.
“Grogar’s seeing eye?” Chrysalis said skeptically.
“I figured out how it works,” Tirek protested, lighting up his horns and blasting the ball with magic. It flooded with black before showing an image of Zephyr Heights.
Sunny lifted her head, intrigued. This may be the only way she could know what was going on outside her prison.
The image zoomed into the city until you could make out pegasi guards marching down the streets and hanging up posters every few meters. The picture zoomed in even more so that they could see what was on the posters… and what she saw made Sunny’s heart stop.
She didn’t remember anything after Cozy Glow had taken over her mind. It was as if she had been merely a puppet while she escaped from Zephyr Heights and retrieved a bell that the villains hung onto and watched every waking second of the day. She didn’t know what she had done, what had happened. All she knew was that she woke up in an unfamiliar place, chained to stone. Perhaps she had done some awful things when she was under Cozy Glow’s influence, but she didn’t know about them and perhaps never would.
“Well,” Chrysalis said after the three villains had read the notice, “that does put a bit of a damper on our plan.”
“Her friends will still try to get her back,” Triek disagreed. “You know how Twilight Sparkle and her friends were - they would do anything for one of their friends. Why should these ponies be any different?”
“Because they’re not Twilight Sparkle,” Chrysalis explained in an agonizingly slow voice.
“Yes, but she’s descended from her,” Cozy Glow intervened, pointing a hoof at Sunny. “And they bear the Elements of Harmony - or, at least, they did. But there was a reason the Elements chose Twilight Sparkle and her friends, and there was a reason they chose these ponies.”
“So we know what to do with her,” Tirek interrupted, jerking his head at Sunny. “But what’s our next step? The ponies will be on their guard right now, but we don’t know what her friends will do. Until we know that, we can’t proceed to the next phase of our plan. So what do we do right now?” He looked between Chrysalis and Cozy Glow and saw that they already had a plan.
“I suppose that it might be a good time to take the other tribes out of the equation,” Cozy Glow said slowly.
“Just think,” Chrysalis hurriedly continued as Tirek opened his mouth. “Flurry Heart knows about the other tribes, but hardly anypony else does, and certainly not all of them. If she convinces the others to join their side, we may never win this.”
“But if we stir up a little chaos,” Cozy Glow added, “they won’t want to help ponies at all. Maybe we can even promise them a fair place in society if they surrender to us.”
Tirek thought about this. “Or they could go to war with the ponies, and while they’re distracted by that, we execute the next stage of our plan, which will cause more chaos and confusion. The ponies will wear themselves out… if they win.”
“Of course they’ll win,” Chrysalis scoffed, “they’ll have the only alicorn in Equestria on their side. But they will be worn out. If we suddenly swoop in and take over while they’re still recovering, there will be nopony to stop us.”
“What if they lose, though?” Cozy Glow intervened. “Or they have some kind of peace treaty or whatever? Her friends know about us - Flurry Heart made sure of that. They won’t be fooled by a war or something. Didn’t those ponies say that they’ve already had things like that? They’ll be too smart - we have to make sure that the other tribes stay neutral for now.” When she saw the looks on the others' faces, she hastily added, “But of course, if we need to, we can always… encourage them to join.”
“That’s more like it,” Tirek growled. He blasted the seeing eye with another beam of magic, and it darkened again. He set it under the table once more and stood up. “So who will go and who will stay?”
“I’ll go, obviously,” Chrysalis snapped. “I can easily blend in.”
“I should go, too!” Cozy Glow enthusiastically volunteered. When the others glared at her, she retorted angrily, “Face it, I’m the best at all of us for manipulation. If you’re going to spread rumors and convince creatures to let the ponies get defeated, you’ll need my help. You can say that I’m an outcast from pony society who sympathizes with their cause or something.” She made a pouty face as the changeling and the centaur considered the option.
“Fine,” Tirek eventually snapped. “Only because I’m the best at keeping an eye on those ponies.”
“Are you really that scared of a pony chained to the wall?” Chrysalis scoffed.
Tirek glowered at her. “I’m talking about the unicorn and the pegasus,” he said in a voice that seethed anger and dripped venom. “Say what you want about ponies being gullible, but I don’t trust them. They’ve been dividing the pony tribes and spreading lies and rumors for years now.”
The three villains parted ways, Chrysalis and Cozy Glow leaving out the mouth of the cave to head to the ‘other creatures’, while Tirek, after fixing Sunny with a glare, left to go find Permafrost and Sour Lavender. Sunny was still lying with her head down, but she was staring at the place where the seeing eye had been without really seeing anything at all.
They wouldn’t have done that…
Would they?
I did leave and go to three of the worst villains Equestria has ever seen and basically handed myself to them.
But would they really do that?
Still, there was no denying what she had seen in the seeing eye. The guards had been posting notices of the most recent decree of the queen that took effect in all of the land - Sunny Starscout was officially wanted for treason to Equestria.
She, Sunny Starscout, was now considered a traitor.