//------------------------------//
// No, don't do that- 
// Story: The life and times of Xante, Baron of the Frozen Wastelands, First among Liches, Lord of the Dead, and Fabulous Rainbow Magic User. 
// by Ssendam the Masked 
//------------------------------//

For a while, we just stared at each other in confusion, me frozen and her just looking at me. We made an unusual tableau, not moving an inch. A random butterfly floated through the open door, landing on my nose. I broke from my frozen state to shoo it off. 
"Xante? What, exactly, did you do to that mirror?" Twilight's voice has an element of anger, and also a bit of betrayal. Oops.
"Miss Twilight, I can-"
She waved a hand. "No. Just no. Zip it. I'm not putting up with that. First, you supposedly reform, and then, you do something like this, after causing a lot of trouble. You have to understand, Xante. I don't want to do this. But you've forced my hand." 

My eyes widened as I was levitated out of the way and she approached the mirror. "I want to trust you, but if you keep doing things like this, then I'm going to have to keep watching you, Xante. Please understand that. By the way, what is this spell? I'm curious; I've never seen anything like this before." The runes around the edge were starting to blacken from overuse. That got me panicking. "Um, Twilight, can I shut it off now? It's not meant to be on for so long. It REALLY isn't."
Twilight raised an eyebrow, but allowed me to get close. With a sigh, I deactivated the spell, and the runes slowly returned to their natural, rainbow colour. Now that the imminent crisis was over, Twilight turned to me.
"I'm not going to ignore this, Xante. What was that spell?" 
I would have given up ANYTHING to not be in this situation. "Um, well, it's not important."
Twilight sighed. "Xante, I want you to be honest with me. If you keep lying, then I'll be forced to detain you. I'm not sure how effective it would be, but I would have to. Because the Princesses still aren't sure about whether or not you're a threat." 

I frowned in annoyance. "Don't meddle with it, it's beyond your comprehension- NO DON'T TOUCH IT!" I swatted her hand away from touching my runes. I checked the runes for signs of smudging. 
"Did you touch any of the runes? If you did, then it'd be bad. Very bad. Not sure how bad, but it could be disastrous."
"Xante!" Twilight tapped her hoof on the floor. It seems as if my reassurances and nervousness weren't doing wonders for my present situation.
"I want a straight answer. Please." She said that with a sad tone of voice. I suppose I should at least tell her.
"Twilight, how do you think I got here?"

She frowned. "Well, the Princesses said that you were from somewhere else, so-"
I interrupted her. "I'm not from another country, Twilight. I'm from another dimension entirely. I'm not meant to be in your world at all. I was sent here by a demon of some sort. And he's preventing me from leaving and I can't find him. It is most vexing, being here. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice world, but I'd rather be home."
Twilight gasped and shied back a little. "A-a demon? But, but demons are imprisoned in Tartarus, I know that much." 
I nodded. "YOUR world has demons that are imprisoned there, that's true. But throughout the multiverse, demons jump through The Void."

Twilight cocked her head to the left at that. "The Void?" 
I explained. "The Void is the space between worlds. It's... nothing. Absolute nothing. No light, no dark, no up, no down, no gravity, no air, no time... absolute nothing."
"And what purpose does the... Void serve?" 
"Padding. You see, if the worlds were to collide, there would be catastrophic consequences for both. But with The Void, the different dimensions are kept separate, unable to interact with each other normally."
"But you crossed over, which means that you have a way to bypass the Void." 
I nodded with a small smile on my lips. "That is correct. That's why I use the Dimensional Mirror. You see, my spell normally requires some rather hard to access regents, and I can only make one. But if I use a mirror, I can bypass most of the process and I don't have to worry about stabilising the portal. It's automatically stable. Problem is, if it's open for too long, it'll do something bad, I'm not sure what exactly."

Twilight raised an eyebrow. "You don't know?" 
I shrugged. "I've never used this spell before, it hasn't been tested. As such, anything bad that happens is entirely going to be worked on."
Twilight looked at me. "Alright, so it's experimental. But... you say that you can travel to other universes? That's amazing!" She said it with such earnestness that I was briefly stunned. 
"Well, yes. But the spell isn't meant to do that right now. It's just a viewing portal really- I use it for when I get bored and I want something to do, like a television."
Twilight and Spike were both confused. "Tele...vision?" 
I explained. "It's like this box that you can put on your wall, or on a table, and you can watch things on it. Somehow, I don't pretend to understand. It's kind of sciencey."

Twilight raised an eyebrow. "Right. So..." her eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. "Would you mind giving me a demonstration?" I didn't see the harm in it. With a flick of my fingers and a large magical circle around my hand, the portal was reopened and we flicked through different Equestrias. 
"Here, in this universe I never came to it." I pointed to a universe that was practically identical. Twilight looked at it. 
"Huh. It looks so peaceful there, without you tromping around." She grinned at me. I pouted back.
"You'd probably go stir crazy without me giving you some fun. Look," here I pointed to another universe, with a purple stallion with a green mohawk, his small purple assistant standing next to him, "here's a universe where you and your assistant swapped roles."

Spike looked at his doppelganger with an appraising gaze. "So that's what I'd look like if I was a pony, huh. Pretty odd to see myself like that." I nodded.
"Truly bizarre. Truly, truly bizarre." 
Twilight's eyes, meanwhile, were shining even brighter. "Oh, dear sweet Celestia... do you know what you could do with this, Xante? You could.. you could rewrite everything unicorns know about the multiverse! I mean, there are other ways around, like Starswirl the Bearded's supposed mirror portal, but there's no way that something like that exists beyond some old myth! Another universe, with alternate versions of ourselves... do you realise what it means?" 

I nodded. "Yes. But the person who taught me this spell told me very firmly to only use this spell for the direst emergencies, for the risk that the spell, when left on, can cause considerable damage to both worlds if left unchecked. Given that she was my grandmother, I'll take her advice."
Twilight was interested in any piece of information about me and my personal life, so she latched onto that as a topic of discussion. "Your grandmother taught you magic?"
"She taught me a bit of magic that wasn't really legal where I come from, like my Dark Rainbow Magic."
I explained for her benefit. "You see, for every magical element, there is a... negative side, as it were. The Dark side. The Dark Side isn't more powerful- more destructive, yes, but not stronger or easier to use. Dark Rainbow Magic is functionally identical to the Rainbow Magic of norm, but it applies to the undead. Using this, I can resurrect the dead as minions to do my bidding, heal the undead and harm with negative energy. Unfortunately, Rainbow and Dark rainbow magics cancel each other out."

I sighed. "But Grandma taught me to be a creative thinker. She always told me, 'if you're not imaginative and varied, then a hero'll probably hit your weakspot like nothing else.' Ah, grandma..." I missed her. I really did. That reminds me, I have a thousand years worth of flowers to put on her grave when I get back, although where I'm going to find a thousand flowers is beyond me.

"Your grandmother sounds kind of odd." 
I nodded. "Grandma was one of the best villains of her day. She set a family precedent for us- from then on, we were a family dedicated to evil. I suppose now I'm the black sheep of the family."
Twilight looked askance at me. "Let me get this straight: your entire family... is evil." 
I shrugged. "Evil is surprisingly hard to be. For starters, the family knows that sooner or later, a hero is going to off them, but with our family, heroes don't get us for a really, really long time. Over the years, we've learned a couple of things: first of all, we learned never to be a jerk by any other moral standard. We also learned to not be evil just because we can, that does terrible things to PR. And we created something called the 'Mugwump List,' to categorise our discovered methods of repelling heroes."

Spike doesn't trust me much now, which I suppose is understandable. "So how can we trust you after you told us all of that?" 
I smiled. "But I've just bared my soul to you and you're judging it, despite my changing being wholly a new choice on my part."
Twilight glared at me. "be that as it may, Xante. You DID cast a spell which could have blown up in your face."
I huffed, crossing my arms and pouting. "I'll have you know that I did actually practise this spell beforehand, and it didn't blow up, now did it?" I noticed that the runes had stopped glowing black and were now shimmering dangerously. 

Twilight obviously noticed it too, as she suddenly started getting closer. Spike didn't, instead going upstairs while shouting about 'warning ponies.' I smiled at Twilight's coming to help me and Spike's sensible attitude, while frantically rechecking the runes. No use; they'd been pushed to their absolute limits and were starting to break. But if I got another caster in here... "This is good, we can fix this spell together. Now, would you say that this is a dangerous rune here, or here?"
Twilight examined it. "What material did you use?"
"Bifrost ice, or ice that I enhanced with Rainbow Magic. Makes it not melt. Now, how much warding do you-"
That was as much as I could get out before the runes finally shattered, despite my rough patchwork. A vortex came out of the portal, sucking us in. Twilight fell through, screaming. I gripped her arm tightly. 
"Hang on! I gotcha!"
Unfortunately, my undead body was starting to come apart a bit, and was tearing. 
"...maybe I don't have you." With that, both my arms tore apart at the elbows. We were sucked in, screaming, into whatever destination the Void had in stall for us. Before that happened, though, I witnessed a golden coin fall into vision, sucked in with the rest of us.

Twilight opened her eyes, then closed them again at the sight of the swirling rainbow coloured environment she was in.
"Hey, are you alright?" She opened them again, to see the face of Xante, with something on his forehead. 
"You're awake? Good. Could you pull this coin out of my forehead then?" 
There are times when all you can say to the other person is 'what?' This was one of those times. 
Twilight blinked. "What?"
Xante sighed, rubbing the area around the imbedded coin tenderly. "You see, while we were being sucked into The Void-"
Twilight interrupted him. "Hang on. The Void?" 
He nodded. "Yes, The Void. Where we are now. Now, as I was saying-"
Twilight was confused by this. "Okay, just stop. You said that The Void was this horrible nothingness, yet it's all pretty... colourful, like Rainbow Dash's hair." 
Xante sighed. "Well, The Void is influenced by magic- for instance, a fire mage going through here would be in a fiery place, while a teleporting mage wouldn't even see the void. Since it was my spell that sent us here, and my presence with the most magic, narrowly, The Void is like this."
Twilight idly noticed that the floor beneath them was ice. She looked at Xante. "Yeah, I guess I can see that. Now, about the coin stuck in your head." 

"The coin stuck in my head? Yeah, I swear the coin appeared just as we were about to go into The Void. Would you mind pulling it out? I would, but it's embedded too deeply for my fingers to reach it."
Twilight nodded. "Sure, I can do that." 
With a flare of purple magic around her hand, the coin came out in a spurt of black ichor. Xante's own hands glowed in a rainbow colour, and the wound was sealed over with greyish-green flesh. 
"Well, at least I don't have a coin stuck in my head for the rest of eternity."
That got Twilight. "Hang on. The rest of eternity?" 
Xante nodded. "You see, once you're in The Void without a suitable way out, you're stuck. Game Over. Nada. And since my spell doesn't work without a mirror, I'm stranded here. I've only got you, and you'll probably die in a couple of months. You can't live on socks, you know."
"Socks?" Twilight looked around. Now that she was fully conscious, she could see that dotted around were, indeed, socks. There was also a considerable amount of spare change, keys and other bits of detritus.
Xante nodded, picking up one. "The little bastards float in here through temporary holes in their universe. We could build a sock fort."

Twilight reviewed what he'd been saying. "So we're stuck."
Xante nodded. "Yep. No way out, not without another portal, or somebody summoning us."
Twilight sat back down. "So, I die of starvation in here, while you look at your damn coin and those socks."
Xante nodded, looking at it. "Very odd coin though. Definitely magical."
Suddenly, twilight's mind locked onto something. "Xante, your new gloves." 
"My new gloves?" He looked at his hands, clad in their new gloves.
"Oh yeah, these. I got them from a nice fellow called Gilgamesh. Said he used them as a sigil-"
Twilight suddenly had a brainwave at the same time as Xante.
"Hang on, if Gilgamesh travelled here with those gauntlets-"
"-Then we can use them as a way out!" Xante beamed, then his face sagged.
"No use. It's a bit too soon to call on him. Maybe try one of the coins?"
Twilight was instantly alerted. "Hang on, COINS? As in plural? You have more magical coins?"
Xante pulled out two other coins, one gold and the other silver. "I was planning to tell you. Hang on."

He took one coin, weighed it in his hand, and flipped it.
"I am Xante, Baron of the Frozen Wastelands, First among Liches, Lord of the Undead, and Fabulous Rainbow Magician. Me and my friend are stranded here in The Void, and need your help!"