They reappeared well outside of Halfmoon’s gravitational influence, thousands of kilometers away and, at this point, hundreds of thousands of kilometers from Popstar itself. They were far enough away now that Popstar’s apparent size was so small that they could properly see behind it. When Sunset had looked back earlier, the star-shaped planet had covered the entire field of view, but now, reappearing in the void of space looking back in that direction, she felt her jaw drop at the sight.

Behind Popstar, beyond the smattering of stars visible within its own galaxy, was a long, thin, and curved group of blue stars. Craning her neck up to look further, Sunset could see that the spiral arm began in a far yellower, long glob of stars. More blue stars could be seen on either end, and she finally registered what she was seeing up close.

In front of them, taking up seventy percent of the half of the sky they could see, was a giant, barred spiral galaxy.

“People on Popstar call it ‘The Heavenly Light,’” Marx mentioned. “It’s really a shame that Dreamland is on the side of the planet facing away from it.”

Sunset took a long breath, just staring at the galaxy for a bit. Eventually, she did draw something from Marx’s statement. “Popstar doesn’t rotate?”

“It does,” Marx explained, “but its axis goes through the center of the star.”

“Right, sure,” Sunset said, at this point just giving up on rationalizing this absurd system. “Now we just have to figure out how to summon this thing.”

She lit her horn, just to prepare to cast anything in general, before her eyes went as wide as dinner plates. She could feel the Warp Stars prod, as if politely asking for access to her magic. Mentally giving a shrug, she figured that this was the way forward and let them in.

Overcome by a strange sensation, she was unable to stop herself as her magic flared. Marx was bodily launched away from her, sent careening backwards through space. Power swirled around her as her eyes glowed aquamarine and she began floating above the Halfmoonian Warp Star. Seven more times her power flared, each recreating a previous planet’s Warp Star. First, the coppery orange of Mekkai, then the stone gray of Cavius. Hotbeat’s was next, followed by Skyhigh’s, Aquarius’s, and Floria’s. Finally, the blindingly yellow form of Popstar’s Warp Star manifested, completing a circle around her.

The eight Warp Stars spun around her twice, once in each direction, before collapsing into one, giant, aquamarine Warp Star in front of her. The Star itself seemed to even have decorative wings, and the top spur was angled in such a way it seemed almost like a gun. Tentatively, Sunset reached out towards the Warp Star.

As soon as her hoof came into contact with it, she let out a cry of surprise. She could feel the Warp Star sapping her magic for something, but it didn’t come with the pain that that would normally entail. Instead, it felt almost like an extension of her own horn, as if she was simply using an everyday spell. It was just that, instead of her power flowing through her horn, it was moving through her hoof and into the Warp Star, instead.

At least, it felt like a normal spell until the sapping became somewhat painful as the Warp Star actually executed whatever it was charging for. It wasn’t a terrible pain–far from it, even–but Sunset was certain that, had she tried something like this without the Warp Star, the magical backlash would have killed her. She wasn’t even quite sure what it was doing, just that it was powerful.

Before long, a bright blue beam fired from the gun-like protrusion. It came to a stop somewhere Sunset estimated to be around three thousand kilometers away, where space itself suddenly cracked. As if spacetime had become as fragile as glass, the crack spread and spiderwebbed until it shattered entirely in a star-shaped hole. The light it released was blinding, but Sunset just could not bring herself to look away as the space within the crack was replaced by a giant, roughly spherical object around the size of Earth’s moon. The space behind it resealed itself, like the universe rejected such a hole in it, and the light from whatever realm the object had come from faded, allowing Sunset to see it in its entirety.

The celestial object was yellow, and now that she could properly see it Sunset could tell that it wasn’t quite a sphere. It was more a hemisphere, but the myriad of giant objects protruding from it were odd, to say the least. A compass, stopwatch, moon-sized piano keys, a telescope, and a massive chicken-shaped weather vane were just the beginning of the oddities. Most stunning was its face, a cat-like mouth sitting beneath two continent-sized blue eyes. Its left eye was squinting, seeming to be forced shut by the hole above it, like it had sustained serious damage before being sealed wherever it had been.

This was the Galactic Nova, an ancient, planet-sized, wish-granting machine. And Sunset’s ticket out of here.

Panting, the orange unicorn stared up at the behemoth. The mere idea that a civilization could exist that was so absurdly powerful to have built this, for it did indeed appear artificial, was so existentially horrifying that she had to actively choose to ignore it. She was sure that she only had one shot at this, so she had to make it count. To hell with the Element of Magic, to hell with that poor feeling in her chest when she thought of leaving Twilight and Spike behind, and to hell with fixing whatever weird problems this universe had. She was getting back to Equestria.

“READY. \n” Nova rumbled, not so much speaking as simply projecting its presence to the entire universe. Such was its power over the very fabric of reality, it could even sew a line break into its speech. “I WILL GRANT YOU ONE WISH. \n”

Sunset opened her mouth, and for a brief moment, no sound came out of it. She tried to tell it her wish, but some annoying part of her mind was keeping her from speaking. And it wasn’t even pragmatic! It was that same part of her that insisted that leaving behind the others was morally wrong, and that she at least had an obligation to bring them back too. And even though she hated it, that part of her felt like it was winning.

She glanced back, and her eyes widened again. Marx was still too far away to shout at them, but was rocketing back towards her with wings she never knew he had. Whipping her head around to face Nova once more and panicking a bit, she shouted her wish.

Discord’s living room once again erupted into a chaotic mess, and he was still baffled that he’d found a form of chaos that he actively disliked. Blasphemous, he knew. But this chaos was angry, almost riotous. Twilight’s friends had suddenly fallen into a pissed-off, hysterical, or otherwise distraught frenzy at Sunset’s declaration.

“That two-timin’, snake-oil sellin’, no-good varmint!” Applejack shouted, throwing her hat to the floor. “She ain’t stoppin’ their Sun and Moon from fightin’, an’ she ain’t even gonna give Twi a way back either?”

Sunburst loudly sniffled again and shrunk in on himself. “I…I thought that that adventure might’ve helped her consider others…” he muttered.

Celestia was frowning, though not in distress. Rather, Discord knew that frown rather well on Sunbutt’s face. She was thinking. “Maybe…maybe she has,” she said.

“She asked for a way back to Equestria,” Celestia pointed out. “Not for her to be instantly transported here.”

“Aye,” Luna agreed, “but We have dealt with so-called wish-granters before. They are ones to take a request and twist it in the most vile of ways. It remains to be seen if this Galactic Nova will do the same.”

“Well, it doesn’t look like a djinn,” Discord commented. “But I have to say, it’s taking a long time to process Miss Shimmer’s wish.”

Discord shrugged and leaned back in the couch. “Well, it’s a pretty simple request. You’d think that it could solve it,” he snapped his talon, “like that!”

Starlight frowned. “Didn’t you say that universe was on lockdown, though?” she asked.

Discord waved his paw in a so-so manner. “That multiverse is, but yes. Nothing has been allowed in or out in around two thousand years.”

bool execute();
friend std::istream& operator >>(std::istream&, Wish&);

…
  std::string action_;
  Travel transport_;
  …

if (action_ == “travel”) {

if (!transport_.check()) {

cout << “LOCATION: ” << transport_.destination() << “ NOT FOUND.”;
cout << ‘\n’;
return false;

}
…

}

…

bool check();
  …
  const std::string& destination() const {return destination_;}
  friend std::istream& operator >>(std::istream&, Travel&);
  …

…
std::string destination_;
…

ifstream in(“locations.txt”);
  list<string> locations;
  string temp;
  while (!in.eof()) {

getline(in, temp);
locations.push_back(temp);
in.ignore();

}
in.close();
for (const string& s : locations) if (s == destination_) return true;
return false;

…

main.cpp
------------
#include <iostream>
#include “Wish.h”
using namespace std;

Wish w;
bool err = true;
while (err) {

cout << “READY.” << ‘\n’;
cout << “I WILL GRANT ONE WISH.” << ‘\n’;
cin >> w;
if (!w.execute()) cout << “WISH INVALID.” << ‘\n’;
else {

cout << “OK.” << ‘\n’;
cout << “3, 2, 1, GO.” << ‘\n’;
err = false;

}

}
return 0;

“LOCATION: EQUESTRIA NOT FOUND. \n” Galactic Nova rumbled, and Sunset’s heart fell. “WISH INVALID. \n”

“READY. \n” Nova repeated, the invalid wish seeming to trigger a reset. “I WILL GRANT ONE WISH. \n”

Marx’s loud cackling behind her did absolutely nothing to help Sunset’s mood. “Wow!” he said between laughs, having caught back up. “You know, I thought you were gonna betray me, but damn this result is a lot funnier than my initial plan!”

Sunset whirled around, her face contorted nearly into a snarl. “Oh, so me not being able to get home is funny to you?”

Marx’s laughs quieted down to a dark chuckle as he shook his head, his metallic wings glinting. “Trust me, it’s hilarious!”

“Fine, then,” Sunset spat. “Make your damn wish. I should’ve known this universe would find a way to screw me out of an easy way home. Go ahead, stop the Sun and Moon from fighting.”

Marx broke out into another laugh. “Jeez, you really do just have a one-track mind on this, huh? I kinda thought you’d’ve figured it out by now!”

The jester used one of his wings to wipe a tear from his eye. “Who do you think got those two riled up in the first place?”

Sunset sat in stunned silence for a few moments as her brain finally caught up to what was going on. Marx had betrayed her, just as she had betrayed him. A part of her felt almost offended that she’d fallen for it, that she’d even bothered to trust him in the first place, but the end result was still the same.

Before she could get a word in to try anything to derail the situation, Marx turned his gaze back to Nova and declared his wish.

Nova spent far less time processing his wish, its eyes only lighting up for the barest fraction of a second. “OK. \n” the planet-sized machine complied. “3, 2, 1, GO. \n”

“WHAT?” Shouted just about everypony in Discord’s living room. Applejack even reached down, picked up her hat off the floor, and threw it down again for extra emphasis.

Fluttershy gasped and ducked back down behind the couch as bright streams of light began flowing from Nova to Marx. The jester cackled wildly as he absorbed the energy and his body began to change. His pink skin noticeably brightened, and the golden frames of his wings shone with new polish. The wings’ hexagonally-tiled membrane separated, Marx’s new magic allowing the hexagons to freely flow over each other. His claws sharpened, and even his hat became longer, the pom-poms at the end fraying.

Personally, Rarity thought he did that last one on purpose as a crime against fashion.

Celestia had sat straight up in her seat, her eyes going wide. Luna looked contemplative, though had a very distinct concerned frown on her face as well.

Sunburst, meanwhile, looked to be all but panicking. “C’mon, Sunset…” he frantically whispered to himself. “You’ve got this…”

Sunset stared, dumbstruck, as Marx’s laughter crescendoed. “You-” he cut himself off with another cackle, “you should see the look on your face!”

That, at least, spurred Sunset enough to get her wits about her. Snarling, she flared her horn. “You son of a bitch!”

An aquamarine beam of light, far more powerful than Sunset had managed to casually summon before, speared out from her horn and slammed directly into Marx’s face. He vanished within it, and for a moment Sunset was hopeful that she had managed to stop his wish when she saw the streams of light from Nova stop.

Then her left ear twitched, and with a short sound not unlike television static, Marx reappeared to her left. The streams of light–which Sunset suspected were Nova transferring power to Marx–resumed flowing into him. He was no longer cackling, at least, but Sunset was quite sure that his expression now was actually worse.

He was breathing deeply, just as surprised as Sunset that he was basically unscathed–and had teleported successfully, for that matter. What little damage her attack had done to him was healing, as well, the small amount of seared flesh having already reconstructed itself. Slowly, his grin spread beyond its previous bounds, crossing not only his face but wrapping around a bit into what were previously his cheeks as well. “This...this is so much power,” he said, barely above a whisper. His eyes focused themselves on Sunset, who had willed Warp Star to back up and face him. For the absolute briefest of moments, Marx looked almost regretful, but his grin sprang back to its full glory rather quickly. “Enough to tie up some loose ends.”

His eyes bulged massively, and Sunset had to fight down the urge to vomit looking at them nearly pop out of his head. She barely had enough time to duck as they suddenly tiled, gaining the look of an insect’s compound eyes, and purple lasers shot out in all directions. Multiple hit her Warp Star, but dealt minimal damage and just knocked her back a few hundred meters.

Spiraling end-over-end, the unicorn fought for control over her ride as the spiral galaxy flashed in and out of her vision. After a disorienting few seconds, she managed to stop its spinning and was once again facing Marx and Nova. The former heaved a great flap of his wings and rocketed forwards at her, but she was already ready with another spell, this one focusing on finely-tuned telekinetic control to at least slow him down.

Then he vanished again, and Sunset’s eyes widened as she heard the tell-tale sound of his teleportation.

Abandoning her planning and acting on instinct, Sunset willed the Warp Star to dive. It rocketed downwards at a breakneck pace in the nick of time, a storm of what looked like arrows flying through her position from just moments before. Granted a very slight moment of reprieve as Marx reoriented himself, Sunset looked forward and constructed another plan as her eyes narrowed in on Popstar. Marx wanted her dead dead, and she couldn’t meaningfully damage him. She needed help, as much as she hated to admit it, and both Twilight and Kirby were powerful enough to lend a hoof.

Plan in place, she started forward, accelerating up to multiple kilometers per second. “Hey!” she heard Marx shout behind her, the sound somehow reaching her despite her speed. Another sound of teleportation, and he was directly in front of her. “We aren’t done here!”

They were, at this point, underneath Nova, Sunset having to swerve under it to get to Popstar. She already had her horn lit and a spell prepared, though, and another beam of magic connected with him before he could try anything else.

She ignored his retaliatory strike–a series of what looked like cutter blades–and sped past, clearing Nova entirely and beginning the long trek towards Popstar. She was still well over a hundred thousand kilometers out, but at the rate she was moving she would reach it in only a few minutes. Sparing a glance back, her jaw dropped.

Marx was charging after her still, as she expected, but Nova was clearly still supplying him power. The streams of energy were just as bright as before, and they seemed to stretch as Marx got further and further away from Nova. Until at some point, they reached a critical length, and Sunset hoped that would somehow sever the connection between them.

Instead, the streams brightened further, more and more power flowing into Marx, and Nova began to move. The planet-sized construct was following behind Marx, and Sunset desperately hoped that that didn’t mean that Marx was dragging it, somehow.

She couldn’t quite see Marx’s facial features from this distance, but he did something to summon a great beam of light, and Sunset realized that he was firing a laser at her just in time to dodge. She yanked the Warp Star up, but even with its protections she could feel the heat of the laser as it passed under her.

That itself raised several questions–in a true vacuum, she should not have been able to feel the heat of it, since it didn’t pass through where she had thought the Warp Star’s air bubble was. She’d been refraining from using her fire because of it; she had thought that it would exhaust the oxygen in her bubble before the Warp Star could replenish it. But if that wasn’t the case…

Flaring her horn, she shot several fireballs backwards and left a Naught Bell’s Explosion in her wake for Marx to run into. Just as she expected, a few seconds later a deafening boom rang out as he slammed right into her mine.

Sunset looked backwards, at least expecting Marx to have been forced to slow down, but instead her eyes widened as she realized that he was, in fact, closer than he had been before. The explosion had done little to stop him, only slightly damaging his right wing, which was correcting itself before her very eyes. He was close enough now that she could make out his expressions, and Sunset had a horrifying realization: all that had done was piss him off.

Well, at least the Sun and Moon had stopped fighting, distracted by the commotion above them.

Still, this was definitely not going to work. Popstar was still at least thirty thousand kilometers away, and Marx was growing more powerful with every passing second. She needed a new plan, and fast. Somewhat subconsciously, her eyes traveled up the streams of energy towards Nova when something clicked for her. That hole in Nova’s forehead was displaying quite a bit of its insides. It was a split-second decision, but with any luck, she would be able to cut off Marx's power at its source and at least give Kirby and Twilight some kind of a chance to beat him.

Before she could manage to turn around, though, Marx visibly snarled. With that same almost staticy sound, he warped again, this time in front of her. “That’s torn it!” he shouted, a white line suddenly splitting his form vertically. To Sunset’s growing horror, he physically split himself in two–his grin never wavering–and between his two halves was a small, perfectly black sphere that warped the light of the galaxy behind it.

In a panic, Sunset forced the Warp Star up a smidge, just barely avoiding the event horizon of the miniature black hole. The spacetime around it was still so incredibly warped that she swung entirely around the black hole and wound up back where she started, albeit upside-down, while moving in an entirely straight line from her perspective.

The extreme gravitational presence ceased quickly enough, thankfully, and Sunset spun the Warp Star to be facing Marx again as she slowly (relatively, at least) began backing towards Nova. “What the fuck was that?” she shouted at him as soon as he put himself back together.

Marx looked just as surprised with himself, but that surprise very quickly faded into glee. “I don’t know!” he enthused. “But it was awesome! So much power right at my wingtips!”

Careful to make sure that Marx was looking at himself and not at her, Sunset glanced back to gauge how much further she had to Nova. The gigantic structure had still been moving towards them, at least, so there was only a few hundred kilometers separating her from the hole above its eye at this point. She just had to stall for a little while longer to keep Marx from stopping her.

“Of course! When I rule Popstar, I can do whatever I want!” Marx declared. “Now wouldn’t that be the greatest prank ever pulled!”

Only around a hundred kilometers now. Sunset could even feel the gravitational effects of Nova’s own mass at this distance.

Marx cackled. “Oh, this isn’t just a prank! This is the prank! The prank to end all pranks! The prank to spit in the face of everyone who sneered at the Noddy that dared take off his sleeping cap and put on a jester’s one! To show up anyone who declared that the ancient lore wasn’t worth a damn! To…where did you go?”

Marx’s eyes tracked upward as Nova approached, settling on the aquamarine and orange glow retreating into the device itself. He frowned and one of his eyelids twitched. “That bitch! Couldn’t even stick around for the monologue!”

Nova’s interior was made of silvery and purplish metals–Sunset suspected some combination of steel and mithril. Based on how just being here felt like it was warping and constricting her magic, she suspected the latter, at least, was correct.

Unfortunately, the structure seemed to have some sort of self-defense system. She was still moving at dozens of kilometers a second, but the windy pathways through Nova and the turrets of some sort detaching from the walls had slowed her down from the hundreds a second she had been aiming for.

Somewhat absently, she pondered what this was even used for. The tube she was in was well over a kilometer wide and roughly cylindrical, so the best she could come up with was the idea that it was some sort of giant coolant system. Regardless, she had an issue to focus on, and yelped as the turrets fired.

She ducked down below the lip of the Warp Star, and on accident touched her lit horn to its surface. Instead of just banging it there and netting herself a hornache for her troubles, the Warp Star suddenly fired a spread of star-shaped projectiles from its gun-like end. Some impacted the floating ones and downed them instantly, and their explosions lingered in the air a bit as Sunset sped past.

She blinked in surprise. Not only was that quite a bit more powerful than what she could manage on her own, but that had spent very little of her magic.

Hurriedly, she repeated the process to take down the rest of the turrets in her way. They were ramping up in intensity, but it took so little magic for her to fire at them she was able to clear out everything in front of her with very little difficulty.

Soon enough, she breached out of the pathway she was in and reached a giant, cylindrical room roughly at Nova’s center. It had to be at least a dozen–if not two dozen–kilometers across and a few kilometers tall, and some sort of electrical force field surrounded its exact center. The cylinder of electricity was a couple kilometers in diameter itself, and eight great columns, from which the current sprang, stretched from floor to ceiling. They were visibly lit up with magic, guarding Nova’s very center.

Floating within the electric cage, seemingly in defiance of any sense of gravity, was a pink object shaped like a Valentine’s heart. It spun lazily in place, pulsating every so often as white streams of energy streaked off of it and into the walls of the room, presumably offering Marx its power.

Frowning, Sunset targeted the nearest column to her and fired. Her Warp Star projectiles just pinged off of the–likely mithril–column with little to no effect. Clearly, she needed a different strategy.

Unfortunately, as if detecting that it was under attack, the entire set of pillars began spinning. Sunset willed the Warp Star to match their speed, but they simply responded with a number of turrets detaching from them and beginning to fire at her.

Shit! Sunset mentally cursed, dodging a shot and shooting back. The turrets went down easily enough, but more just kept coming almost as fast as she could shoot them down. She needed some way to take out the turrets and focus her own magic on the pillars simultaneously.

She suddenly grinned as a thought crossed her mind. She could lend her own power to the Warp Star for it to use more efficiently, but only for certain things. But if she could draw that power back out, maybe she could use it for her own spells! Tentatively, she pressed down on the Warp Star with her hoof and willed the magic into her.

Instantly, her horn’s corona flared to multiple times its original size as more magic than she could use at once flooded her system. She was certain that she was screaming–the pain was far greater than anything she had felt before in her entire life–but she couldn’t hear it over the sound of the blood rushing in her ears and her own magic’s deafening twinkling. She could even feel her cutie mark glowing as well, her native talent for these magicks pitching in for this feat.

The turrets nearest to her all immediately exploded, unable to withstand the heat that she was putting out. The closest pillar began to glow red hot as, gradually, her scream of pain morphed into a roar of determination. The exterior of the column began to melt until, finally, something broke inside of it and it exploded, sending molten mithril everywhere. Absently, Sunset used some of the absurd amount of magical energy running through her to put up a shield and defend herself from the metal, but the majority of her mind (at least, the part of it that wasn’t dedicated to fighting to retain consciousness) was focused on attacking the pillars.

At some point, the pillars began rotating in reverse. Sunset hardly noticed. The aquamarine color of the Warp Star began to drain at its edges as she pulled more and more power from it. Sunset hardly noticed. One by one, the pillars of Nova’s defense system fell. Sunset hardly noticed.

All she really was even able to notice was the magic running through her system. It was drawn up from the Warp Star, through her hooves, and rushed through the rest of her body until it concentrated in her horn. Unicorns were never supposed to use this much magic at once, and doing so was so incredibly dangerous. It happened, every so often, that a unicorn driven to intense stress, moreso than could be achieved even by human torture methods Sunset had heard of, might have a magical flare like this. That, however, would usually kill themself and everypony around them, as magical flares of this size usually left the caster dead. As it was, Sunset suspected that the only thing keeping her body from ripping itself apart at a cellular level was the Warp Star’s own protective magicks, but the part of her brain that thought that was very quickly brought into the rest of the fold of registering the pain.

But as soon as Sunset’s visual cortex could register that the final pillar had exploded, she forced the drain closed and stopped casting. Slamming her hoof down on the Warp Star, there was one final spike of pain as the excess magic rushed back into it and restored its coloration. She panted, her throat sore from the screaming and the rest of her sore from the magic, but she smiled all the same. The electrical shield was down and Nova’s core was exposed.

“SUNSET SHIMMER!” Marx bellowed, rushing out of the corridor she had come through.

“OH FUCK!” Sunset shouted back as well as she could with how sore her throat was. She was still just as quick to react, at least, and managed to dodge the laser that Marx fired and willed the Warp Star to get as far away from Marx as she could.

Neither of them noticed the missed laser ricochet off of Nova’s heart and hit the ceiling, leaving behind the faintest of cracks in the heart’s surface.

Marx rushed after Sunset far faster than she could move her Warp Star in the limited space. He bore down on her extremely quickly, his sharpened claws glistening in the faint light that the heart provided. Sunset, looking back, cringed, prepared a shield that she hoped would at least slow him down, and closed her eyes to accept the inevitable.

Marx’s strike, though, never came, as instead Nova–and everything in it–suddenly lurched to the side.

Nova, and thus both Sunset and Marx, had been traveling towards Popstar at close to a hundred kilometers every second. Whatever had just stopped it also stopped everything inside of it in its tracks, except for three things: Sunset, the Warp Star she was on, and Marx.

Inertia dictated that, even as Nova itself stopped, they continued moving. Inside the core, this translated to suddenly being thrown at the wall at multiple times the Earth’s escape velocity. The only saving grace was the sheer size of the room, giving Sunset about a quarter of a second to realize what was happening before she would be vaporized on impact. Using just about all of her willpower, she directed the Warp Star to slow the fuck down, which bought her just enough time to organize an emergency teleport outside of Nova itself.

Vaguely, she thought she heard Marx crash into something and heard glass shatter, but she didn’t have time to think about that at the moment. That had to have busted up Nova’s core something fierce, and if this universe had taught her anything, it was to expect the most dramatic conclusions.

She reappeared fairly close to Nova's face, took stock of the situation, and began to flee as quickly as she could. “GET OUT OF HERE!” she shouted at the Sun and Moon in the process, who seemed to have had stopped their feud to halt Nova’s advance. Her voice was still a little hoarse, but the shouting was necessary, so by Celestia’s sunny flank she was going to shout. “IT’S GONNA BLOW!”

Marx was having a much worse time. When Nova had suddenly stopped, he was launched directly into its core at about a hundred kilometers per second. It wasn’t enough to kill him–with how much power Nova had granted him, he figured that he was indestructible at this point–but it was enough to hurt.

Worse yet, him slamming into the heart had shattered it, releasing a sticky pink goop that clung to every part of him it encountered. The heart had very quickly reformed with him stuck to it, as well, and no matter how hard he struggled, he couldn’t get out.

His cutter blades did nothing, his laser beams were entirely ineffective, the heart was preventing him from forming a black hole, and it was even stopping him from teleporting! It shifted and rippled every time he struggled, but no matter what it unerringly returned to its original shape!

Somewhere in the distance, but still within Nova itself, something crashed, and Marx’s eyes widened. It had sustained too much damage.

Another crash, and he even whimpered as the realization of his doom washed over him.

When the Galactic Nova had originally been sealed, its creators redesigned it to only grant a single wish, as to prevent any malicious actors that managed to unseal it from taking over the universe in one fell swoop. But damage to its core had also damaged some of its systems, and it happened to skip over its check that a user hadn’t already used a wish when Marx shouted.

And so, just moments before its own destruction, the Heart of Nova granted one, final wish, and Marx’s world went white.

Marx groaned as he opened his eyes, and immediately closed them again as light shone in them.

Marx groaned again and forced his eyes open, regardless of the light. “What the hell?”

Slowly, the indistinct lights resolved themselves into a single campfire, and Marx realized that he was in a cave of some sort. The figure that had been speaking to him, which had detached, gloved hands, was floating around a quarter of a meter off the floor next to it. It was dressed in a blue robe, a scarf covering much of its face aside from its bright yellow eyes surrounded by brown skin.

The figure blinked, and seemed to be considering something for a moment. “Joh! You speak Somnic!” The figure’s eyes turned up a bit, and Marx got the impression that it (he?) was smiling. “Sorry if I have rust; it has been long time since I learned your language.” The figure held out a hand, and Marx cautiously took it in his wing to get helped to his feet. “I is Magolor. What is your name?”

A Purple Pony Princess's Problems on Planet Popstar

by ANerdWithASwitch

Chapter XXIII: Milky Way Wishes