You know, I’ve had some bad days since I was reborn as a soul-sucking monster whose only purpose in life is to kill beautifully innocent creatures. The biggest one being the time I decided to not do what my lack of a cutie mark was telling me, and nearly got beaten to death for it by what could be considered my mom. Ever since then, I kind of had this whole problem with trying to pick on things that could kick my ass.
Sure I had picked fights with pirates, manticores, and a dragon, but those things couldn’t really stand up to me on so many levels. Well, except for the dragon, but I had minions to distract him, and good enough aim to put a hole in his eye that went straight to his brain.
And what with Grogar being giant demonic demon goat…thing, I was pretty sure he could fall into the category of 'crap not to mess with'.
Thankfully, the presence of the super saiyan pony gave me something to let do all the work for me. Unfortunately, even as I watched Celesta blazing like a walking sun that promised to turn anything that fucked with her into a pile of ash, my knowledge of her track record, the way things worked out the last time she went mono-e-mono with a boss character, and the little piece of Tia’s soul that was currently resting inside my head (technically it was more like my stomach but head sounds better) which that told me she had about five minutes of fight time before running on empty said things were not going to go well for her if it came down to a mystical slobber knocker.
In short, despite the impressive display from the horse goddess of the sun, we were still uber-boned unless something was done by the two much less powerful characters of the party. So while Aragon was outfighting the Dark Lord Sauron, me and the human of a hobbit would have the real job of finding the horn head’s power source and destroying it.
“So, any idea where Grogar’s bell tower might be?” I asked the magical expert of the group. I had no illusions about being the one to do all the bomb disarming work after all. That would be the job of the sun goddess’s student that knew more about magic than how to hunt and kill stuff with it.
Don’t get me wrong, I knew magic. The whole necronomicon of changeling magic had been downloaded into my brain since the day I was born. But reading an instruction book on how to do stuff and actually doing it were two very different things. I was more of the super brawler type of magic user that just took a big stick and beat the hell out of the thing that pissed me off than the subtle artist that Twilight was. My time with Twilight had taught me a few new spells, but the kind of magic changelings use is a bit different than what unicorns shoot out of their horns, and trying to copy it despite our similarities is like learning a different language. Sure that language is Spanish to my English and all the letters are the same, but its still pretty damn hard to do.
And I sucked at Spanish.
Hell, monster goat might not even use Spanish...although since he apparently ran on stolen unicorn magic, it was my best bet.
So I was counting on the magical prodigy to walk me through disarming Grogar’s big magical thingamajig before Celestia lost her fight. I was just thankful she hadn’t tried to do another power struggle thing and match her Kamehameha against Grogar’s Gallic Gun. The last time that happened, she got knocked on her ass in front of all Canterlot. It was not a good day to be Tia.
“What?” the terrified teenager next to me exclaimed. “Okay, first off, it’s a tower, so I’m guessing it won’t be that hard to find from the air. But why the hell would you want to go up there? And why the hell do you even need me?”
I repressed the urge to groan, and lowered my voice in case Grogar had super hearing, or Tia might pick up on my words and stop sending me confidence via her soul-piece thingy. Without that, I was pretty sure I would have been in the same boat as Sunny. “Listen, Celestia doesn’t have enough power to fight Grogar for long, and…considering he’s not backing down after seeing her flare up, I’m guessing he’s at least in her magical weight class. Plus, he can still look this way and kill us.”
Well, kill Sunset anyway. Changeling exoskeletons were only grown by magic, they didn’t need it to continue to function. Considering mine had been reinforced when I had the Alicorn Amulet, I was pretty sure I was in the clear when it came to my chances of surviving whatever double-horn-head had to throw at me. Safe from being one-shotted at least.
“Okay fine let’s go,” she grumbled before unclasping her hands from of the little bit of wall we were hiding behind.
On the battlefield, the staring contest between Grogar and Celestia continued for a good minute. I guessed that since the giant goat saw something bigger and with a lot more power than what he was used to, there was a reluctance to attack it when he could just wait for his fog to slowly eat away at the power the pony was using to maintain her flames. At the same time, he was seeing a creature use its magic for what might as well of been a special effect, and I could Smell that the guy was a little wary of it. Either way, hesitation was definitely the way to go in his position, and it didn’t even hurt his standing at all.
Then Sunset stepped out from behind our cover.
Grogar looked out in our direction, and Tia charged forward upon either seeing an opening, or realizing that Sunset was in danger. The clopping of her hooves drew the goat’s attention, and Grogar’s bell lit up a second before his horns glowed with power to shoot twin beams of magic at his opponent.
Celestia’s horn blazed with light and she used the alicorn horn raising stance to fire bend the flames underneath her into a wall that did absolutely nothing to stop Grogar’s magical blast from blowing a hole in the flames that weren’t meant to block diddley in the way of attacks. However, they did keep the goat from seeing her take to the air for a few seconds and fly up until she was out of his line of vision. A second later, the flame wall died out, an Gogar was left looking on at the empty castle grounds. Then he got a fifteen-hundred pound blazing alicorn to the face!
As the goat got smacked into the ground, I grabbed the gimpy girl and got gone from the gate. Thanks to the boost Tia had given me before the fight began, I had enough magic to strengthen myself enough so that flying while carrying Sunset was doable…if kind of annoying since the human’s body being in front of me made it hard to see. Or impossible really, I even had to turn my head to keep my muzzle from digging into her back while more forelegs held her up via where they were latched under her arms.
“I found the bell tower,” she told me.
“Where?”
“It’s the one right in front of us with the bell in it dumbass! What are you, blind?”
I growled. “No I just have this big and bulky human thing in front of me fatty!” Plus, I needed to keep my eyes on the fight going on beneath us in case Grogar decided to look up and shoot us down.
And it was pretty cool to watch an epic battle involving a pretty pony princess. That sort of stuff never happened in MLP.
“Wait, you mean we’re flying blind?!”
I ignored the question to watch what was transpiring below.
The fire that Celestia had surrounded herself with had changed from a wild inferno that stretched outwards from her second skin of flame to cover the floor to one that was mostly concentrated around her hooves while leaving the rest of the princess’s Radmidash impression little more than a campfire level of glow as she created a miniature sun around Grogar’s head.
What was weird about it was, I knew exactly what she was doing. For the insight, I blamed the little piece of Tia that Celestia had cut out of her soul and put into my body. I didn’t quite understand how it all worked since nothing like this had happened to a changeling before, but when you put a piece of yourself into a creature that is a natural at mind magic (or being psychic for those of you that don‘t believe in that junk) there’s probably going to be some weird mind shit going on. Whether it was intentional on her part or not was still up for debate.
But it did give me an insight to her actions. Like how she was actually trying to melt Grogar’s bell instead of burn his face off by dunking it into a mass of solar fire. Although I didn’t think she’d be losing any sleep if the old goat were to happen to die while she was trying to burn his face off.
It was actually a pretty good idea. Anyone who's played RPGs knows you don’t go after the uber god being directly while he’s got all his defenses in play. While this wasn’t exact same, the basic principle still held. I had seen Grogar’s bell glow with mystical energy when he first showed up, and as far as my knowledge of Equestria went, goats didn’t have the power to blow shit up or grow to double pony size. So my limited knowledge about the monster had to have been correct. The old goat needed his bell to actually put up a fight, and Celestia was focusing all her efforts on taking it down.
Then a dark red light that clashed with Celestia’s golden yellow erupted from the ground, and both of them went flying apart from one another.
“Pull up you idiot!”
Sunset’s voice jerked my attention away from the battle, and I pumped more magic into my wings to do just that. A second later I saw the roof of the keep beneath me, and turned so I could look in the same direction Sunset had been paying attention to.
The tower she had been guiding us towards was the one at the very center of the keep. It seemed pretty out of sorts with the way it just stood there, jutting out from the cubic mass of stone to rise into the air. I couldn’t see the top from the position we were at, so I addressed my navigator. “So the bell’s in there?”
“Yes, now get moving!”
I grit my teeth, my temper close to snapping. A few insulting comments I could put up with, and I tried to tell myself that this wasn’t exactly the best of situations for a calm mind, but…getting bitched at by a teenager that was really a much older pony but still looked and sounded like a whiney brat didn’t help my mood one single bit. “What the hay is your problem Sunset?”
“Celestia’s fighting for our lives and you’re just floating here wasting time! That’s my problem!”
My anger didn’t quite dissipate, but it became a lot easier to hold in check after hearing the kid’s words. Judging by the bitch queen act in the movie, and what I’d seen of her IRL (good God I was still adjusting that) anger was Sunset’s go to emotion when she was in a tight spot, or worried, or…probably anything other than in control really.
Once I had gotten a general idea of where to go, I flew me and Sunset up to the bell tower with only a moderate amount of demanding course corrections from the human. We landed in the belfry and I took a look at the dark golden bell hanging in front of me.
The bell was freaking huge, like…church bell huge. The kind of church bells that could cover a whole man while he stood up and still leave some room for his head to clear the ceiling. With that and the odd aura I was picking up from it, I knew this wasn’t some glorified decoration meant to trick us like an intelligent villain would have put out as bait for a trap or something.
Cause you know, that was what I would have done if I had been running the place.
Still, just because I knew it was magic didn’t mean I knew what to do about it.
A month of living in Tia’s old house and some tutoring by three alicorns on the subject had let me get pretty well acquainted with magical artifacts in both the academic and actual realms of experience. It helped that changelings had a bit of a talent for sensing magic thanks to the whole predator thing, so it made identifying stuff kind of easy.
There were actually very few bare bottom, all around rules that everything had to follow when it came to magical thingamajigs. Some radiated power and made you feel all tingly inside, and others didn’t even look like anything beyond your basic magical textbook until you read their activation phrase. A few made even me want to throw up just by being around them, and stuff like the Tree of Harmony gave me an overwhelming sense of peace and clarity that I took a trip down into the cavern beneath the old castle to just sit around for an hour…or four every few days.
Honestly, that damn thing has done wonders for my mood over the past month.
The bell kind of fell into the later category of things. I could tell that it had power, and that it was old. The thing kind of had what’d you’d call a grandma smell to it, only it was my magical senses that were picking it up, not my nose. Up close, I could sense that there was indeed a mystical outpouring of energy that was feeding the mystical fog around us.
“So, any ideas?” I asked the magical genius that knew more about the freaking Element of Magic than its owner.
“Damn it, you’re the insecticorn! I thought I was just getting taken out of danger!” Sunset replied from between her teeth. “I don’t have my horn, I can’t detect magic, and I’ve spent the past two years where stage magicians are the closest things to actual arcane power. So excuse me for being a little out of practice!”
The sound and physical shock of a loud explosion reached my ears and shook the ground beneath my hooves. I looked back to the battleground. Apparently, Celestia and Grogar had gotten tired of circling each other, and were going at it again. From the looks of things, the goat was the one with the advantage.
Grogar fired dual blasts of magical energy from his curled horns time and time again, making Tia run, bob and weave to avoid them. All the while she refrained from returning fire, probably because of the fact that the city’s fog would have eaten away at any attack that the alicorn could call up until it was too weak to do any damage to Darth Goat. And to top it off, I could see her flames were dying down to ember levels instead of the raging inferno that they had been a minute ago.
Unfortunately for Tia, pony bodies with asses big enough to cause earthquakes upon sitting down were not meant for bobbing and weaving, and if Celestia bothered to build up enough speed, her momentum would make it impossible to dodge. Closing the gap between the two of them didn’t seem to be an option either. It would have been like getting closer to a guy who has a gun pointed at you.
Sure Rainbow could probably zip and zoom around the guy like nobody’s business and Pinkie would just pop up behind him, but I got the creeping feeling that without the ability to teleport…Tia was up shit creek without a paddle.
I also noticed one other disturbing fact about the fight. Despite her moving around, Grogar was slowly backing her into a corner. While the alicorn had to turn, jump, and do all that other crap, all he had to do was tilt his head and wait the three seconds it took to charge his attack spell. A spell we had no idea as to what kind of damage it would do to a pony I might add.
The was also the problem with Tia’s time limit. Thanks to our link, I guesstimated she had about three minutes of fight time left. Unless she actually did something stupid like, I don't know, fought back. Then it was closer to sixty seconds.
“Nuts,” I mumbled before looking back to the bell, then to Sunset. “Okay, ancient golden bell that radiates an anti-magic fog and empowers goats wearing a smaller bell. Come on, Sunset, you knew more about the bucking Element of Magic than Twilight did! Enough to dark magic yourself into…that red thing! You knew enough about magic that Celestia made you a student and kept you close to her based on talent. Do you know how Twilight got the position? Tia saw a picture on her plot! So get yours in gear and tell me how to shut this thing down!”
Sunset glowered at me for a moment, then looked up to the bell. “Fine, just let me think for a second.”
I went back to watching the battle, thankful for the pseudo-pegasus pony-ness in me that gave me vision that could have suited an eagle or hawk. With magic to feed my eyes, they gave me a perfect view of the fight despite the fog. Grogar had actually managed to corral Tia into a corner, and judging by the way everybody was moving they both apparently knew it.
“Sunset.”
Thankfully, the goat was taking his time in approaching the mare. I don’t know if it was just the whole cliché villain strut thing, or if he had enough of an IQ to still be cautious about Tia, or he was just savoring the moment before the kill. If I had to pick, I guess I could buy the last one as some psychopathic need for the goat to make his prey feel all vulnerable and junk.
As a changeling, I kind of understood those urges.
Considering the fact that the alicorn had gone back to being a big fat pony with an imitation rainbow mane instead of a blazing goddess of fury, it looked like it was working.
“Sunset, really need you to hurry it up now.”
“Shut up,” she said from the other side of the bell.
Celestia fell to her knees.
“Sunset.”
Grogar slowly moved in for the kill.
“I said shut up,” she replied, her voice taking on a weird echoing quality as she looked up inside the bell for some reason.
“SUNSET!”
As Grogar stood over the panting alicorn that appeared to be fighting just to stay on her hooves down below in the courtyard, I could practically hear him gloating.
“Fine!” she yelled before getting out from under the bell. “Just ring the damn thing!”
I frowned at the girl, and looked away from the fight completely, a little miffed I was going to miss its end. “What?”
Sunset glared at me before she pointed to the object in question. “Look, there’s no symbols, no pictographs or writing of any sort on the inside or outside, and no weird indentations,” she told me in an angry tone. “That means no activation phrase, no special code that has to be punched in at the right order, and no keys or other magical devices that have to be put in or taken out. That usually means the only way to turn the magic on or off is to use it. SO JUST RING HIS FUCKING BELL ALREADY!”
I took a second to just stare at the kid and the idiocy of the situation. I mean, here we were in some dark dimension controlled by a goat who had an army of Star Wars reject henchmen (henchhams?) who made it his business to kidnap unicorns and steal their magic using this semi-all powerful device that was literally put out where everyone could see it, and all we had to do to beat him was fly up and hit the damn thing. I mean…it made no fucking sense…
…and kind of fit right in with everything else that had been happening in my life for the past couple of months when I really thought about it.
So I groaned, turned around to point my ass at the stupid magical object of infinite darkness, then did the whole Applejack thing. You know, bucking. The bell let out a resounding gong like…well…a gong. Seriously, bells big enough to hide a pony don’t ring, they gong.
Loudly.
My entire body shook, and I actually felt the suffocating sensation that had been smothering me the whole time I was in Tambelon let up. Plus, since I was turned around again, I got a good view of Grogar as he moved in for the kill on his prostrating opponent, and then looked away from Tia to see what was making all that racket where we were.
Good God was he stupid. Okay, apart from the whole no taking your eyes off an opponent thing, he had a wounded animal cornered. Plus the whole thing where he took his time kind if made the whole three strikes and you're fucked thing come up because…well…
Tia cut off her cool flames mainly because they were kind of useless if she couldn’t get him in close range. And although she was cornered, Grogar hadn’t actually managed to tag the alicorn once since the fight started. Plus, Celestia hadn’t been bending down because she was tired or giving up…even though I suppose it could have looked that way to a guy with an ego the size of Mars, she was crouching.
You know, the way some animals do before they pounce?
So when the bell rang, Tia’s horn lit up and her wings extended, and she shot forward in one motion with her entire body with this blazing horn thrust so fast that it tore through Grogar’s body before there was an explosion of flame, and Celestia went skidding down half the courtyard with a wave of fire trailing behind her while Grogar was sent tumbling through the air to smack down on the ground a second later.
I gave the bell two more kicks for good measure to keep it going, then grabbed Sunset and made my way down to where Celestia was waiting for us. When we landed, the alicorn trotted up to us, and I got a look at Grogar’s roasted form with its still sizzling hole behind the sun goddess as she and Sunset met up.
“Are you alright?” they both asked at the same time. Although while Sunset was a little surprised at the question, Celestia just got a little…warm and fuzzy inside before she kept talking. “I am the teacher Sunset. You don’t get to worry about my health.”
Then she turned to me. “Omnifarious, are you well?”
I blinked at the question. Celestia should have been the one we needed to be looking after. “Yeah I’m fine. Can you get the portal spell working now before the reinforcements break through Grogar’s front door?”
I really didn’t feel like taking on an army of cannon fodder when I was at five-percent mana. Carrying around a human in Tambelon's fog hadn't done anything good for my batteries.
“An excellent suggestion,” Celestia replied before her horn lit up. A minute later, I felt the last of Tia’s magic come to rest on that little red zone under E of her magical gas tank, and a golden hole in space and time opened to provide us with an exit. The alicorn’s legs buckled with exhaustion, but she didn’t up and collapse like I did back in our cell, so I figured everything was going to be okay.
Then I heard this growling groan of a noise coming from behind us, and looked back to see the burnt corpse of Grogar pick himself up. And yes, it was a corpse. Tia’s last attack had turned his bell to slag metal and ripped a hole in the goat’s shoulder that exposed bone for crying out loud. To add to the creep factor, the guy actually looked smaller. Gone was the imposing figure that could look Celestia in the eye. Instead there was this gaunt…thing that looked little more than…well…skin and bones.
The guy was dead, and he was still moving. I mean I was willing to chalk up the lack of blood to some light saber effect since Tia probably burned a million degrees or something when she rammed him, but nothing survived that kind of damage and lived to tell about it.
Although he didn’t seem as teasingly powerful as before, the shear creep factor that a zombie goat with glowing red eyes and fang teeth had was enough to give me a good chill. Then there was his freaking grainy voice that belonged on the set of an Evil Dead movie. “Nothing…escapes…from Tambelon!” it went.
Not fair man. I didn’t even bother taking stock of our current situation. Hell, I didn’t have to. I knew Tia was out of commission as far as walking more than one mile an hour went, her fucking hair didn’t even look as shiny as it had a minute ago. Sunset was…a kid, and I wasn’t about to rely on her to save our butts. Then there was me, the underpowered changeling monarch that hadn’t eaten in days and was only still alive due to the grace of a sun goddess.
Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to kill the thing to death, but I just didn’t have enough of Twilight’s love juice in me to power an ass kicking spell.
So I skipped the whole self-sacrificing noble thing where I went one on one with an undying goat monster while the only way out was probably opened for a few seconds, and just gave my witty response. “Watch me,” I said before wishing there was a pony stand-in word for bitch.
Then I rammed Tia’s ass with my shoulder to push her through the gate a second after Sunset Shimmer cut and run under her orders in a tone that wasn’t open for debate. Sheer stupidity had me glancing back in time to see the undead goat leap at me, which made me let out a squeal of manly terror because…well shit it’s freaking zombie goat, even pastel pony princesses don’t properly prepare you for that.
It actually took me a second to recover and realize that I did have enough of Tia’s magic in me for one last burst in me thanks to the fact that Tambelon’s anti-magic fog had been turned off. So I charged and fired right as Grogar opened his mouth to bite my head off or something, and I took him in the chest with a concussion blast that knocked him back a foot. Nowhere near my best work, but any magical smackdown blast that could knock a bad guy on his ass would do.
Then I looked back at the gate and moved to get the hell out of Dodge.
But of course, the zombie had to get up and give me his last minute villain monologue before I got through the gateway. Hell, I even looked back to listen to the damn thing. “It doesn’t matter where you go. I will find you. I will hunt you down, and I will devour you all!”
I would have given a snappy heroic comeback, but the portal was starting to look a little too unstable for me to take the time to come up with a crippling retort and well…the guy just fucking creeped me out. I wanted to be gone.
So I jumped through the gateway and felt everything go upside down as the world was turned into sea of colors that probably would have given me a brain seizure if I tried to follow how it was all flowing together. It really made me wish Tia had invented some kind of magical Stargate slide spell thingy for traveling to different words rather than the sloshing rainbow lake of color that I ended up falling through.
Then the world returned to normal, and I found myself ramming into a wall of white.
A groaning wall of white.
“Ti-um, Celestia?” asked while my brain attempted to adjust from the acid trip of a ride to normal ponyland physics and scenery. “Is that you?”
“Yes,” my landing cushion replied. “Would you mind getting off me now?”
It took me a second to get my wings working, and I picked myself off her before landing a few inches away from the out of it alicorn. Thanks to the fact I had four legs, I managed to avoid falling on my ass. I kept my head pointed at the ground for a minute to help with my vertigo.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Tired but…unharmed,” she replied after I heard the ruffle of wings. “How is Sunset?”
I didn’t know I she was having he same nauseatingly ‘I want to just collapse’ sensation that I was and just didn’t want to move to check, or if she really was so tired she couldn’t move but…I lifted my head to check. Then after my brain got through punishing me for daring to move my head, my vision cleared and I looked the unconscious girl over from where I stood.
Sunset must have been thrown a bit harder out through the portal than me and Tia because she was laying unconscious a good five feet away. She looked okay. There weren’t any bruises or blood that I could see. All five fingers were there…on her hands…that were...still there…
Because, you know…she was still human.
My brain kind of froze up for a minute there.
How the hell was she still human? Wasn’t the mirror supposed to fix that?
I mean hell, it...wasn’t the same one me and Tia used to go pick her up. Which probably meant the magic surrounding her didn’t get its release command...if there was any magic still involved in the thing. For all I knew, it was one of those things that turns ponies in to people instead of generating some soft of chameleon field thingy.
Which meant she was going to be really pissed off when she woke up. Not to mention freaked out.
Still, my inner smartass did managed to get a word in. “Well…a human in Equestria…that’s just...super.”
There are times in a man’s life…or whatever the hell I am, (to be honest I’m still trying to figure that out) that they must endure great pains and trials. Some go to work at a dead-end job to feed their family. Others go to war, and…the ones like me get chewed out by their magically adept girlfriends in a way that makes us angry, guilty, sad, and apologetic all at the same time.
“Four days, four days I spent worrying about you AGAIN!” Twilight yelled as she paced back and forth while I sat back on the bed of what was now our guest suite in the palace and let her vent. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to run a government while you’re worried about your fillyfriend’s mental state?”
I suppressed my survival instincts for the moment and raised a hoof to draw her attention. “Could we go with the male version of a pony in relationship from now on with me?” I asked.
She looked around to glare at me some more. “I’m being serious here!”
So was I but…I suppose there was a better time and place for my gender-bender term battle. “Sorry,” I told her before letting out a sigh. “About everything I mean. To be honest…I’m pretty sure if you had helped me, this whole mess could have been avoided.”
“And another thing, HOW IN THE HAY COULD YOU COULD YOU THINK I’M JUST A FIGMENT OF YOUR IMAGINATION?”
I gulped, but managed to find some defense from that little jab. “Oh come on, that was just all the stress and…you know, you’ve had crazier ideas,” I tried to tell her. Then I immediately regretted it. This really wasn't the time for arguing, I needed to just let her vent because...well...I really didn't have much of a defense for denying the existence of reality and all that.
Twi glared at me again, and at that point I was a little glad that Twilight had let me feed off her when we got back as well as worked the transformation spell to make me fully pony female instead of the mannish changing queen that I apparently looked like to other ponies. Something told me Twilight wouldn’t be offering herself up as food for me anytime soon.
What really hurt wasn’t the words, as angry as she was…it was kind of hard to consider an adorable little pony threatening when I knew she wasn’t going to get all violent on me and junk. No, I got all my guilt from the emotions radiating off the mare.
My actions had hurt Twilight...again. She wasn’t just angry, she was feeling guilty. Hell, I could already see her tuning this whole thing in on herself like she had with that damn spell book. Yeah sure she cast the spell, but Celestia had sent the damn thing without a warning label. Just because I didn’t want Luna to replace her as the supreme monarch of Equestria anymore didn’t mean I was handing out pardons for her previous bouts of idiocy.
As Twilight paused in her tirade, which had come to roundabout insults to my intelligence and my inability to tell fantasy from reality, I took in a breath and doled out the classic apology. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah well…I should have guessed you were going to be high maintenance after the first month,” she grumbled, which kind of threw me for a loop. I mean, Twilight Sparkle thought I was the one who needed reassuring and high upkeep in the relationship?
My newly resurrected manly pride that Celestia had coaxed back to life took a bit of a hit right in the balls from that one. I mean come on! That… That was just…ouch.
“So um…anything else?” I asked hesitantly.
Twilight sighed and shook her head. “And...you’re sure you’re okay?”
Well I was tired, still had a bit of Celestia in me…which I really needed to see if she could take out, feeling like crap for making Twilight freak out for God only knew how long, but physically… “I’m okay Twilight. Sorry for making you worry again.”
The alicorn groaned and collapsed on the bed. “Well, at least its over,” she mumbled before looking back up at me. “And you’re never doing anything like this again?”
“No.”
“Promise me,” she ordered.
I had to repress a smile at that. I mean seriously, four days without Twilight had made me how cute she could be, especially when she was trying to be serious. “I promise.”
“Really promise,” she told me with a frown. “Say the whole thing.”
My admiration for the Princess of Adorkableness ground to a halt as I realized what she meant. You…you got to be…oh screw it. “Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye.”
When she lightened up a bit, I repressed a sigh and I hoped I wasn’t blushing with embarrassment. I mean seriously, I had managed to avoid plenty of stuff since I got to Equestria, like the most girlish of games, hooficures, and all that junk, but it seemed the pinkie promise finally caught up to me.
So in the short time that I’d been back, I had managed to upset my girlfriend that I was still kind of surprised was deciding to stick around, and got caught by the most childish saying in existence. All in all, it seemed pretty par for the course and I actually found myself preferring it from the goat demon zombie thing that I had gotten away from just hours prior.
It was good to be home.
Then the door opened, and I had the sneaking suspicion that Equestria wasn’t finished yet.
Especially when I saw Celestia walk into the room, followed by Sunset Shimmer…on two legs…that still had boots on them…because that’s what humans wore.
The appearance of the human set Twilight on edge. I detected bits of anger, fear, and strangely enough…jealousy on her psychic scent. The whole thing just make me think, what the hell?
“Sunset,” Twilight mumbled. “You’re still…why is she still human?”
I was a little confused by that fact myself. Tia had said she would remove the transformation spells that were keeping Sunny in biped form after some rest but…Twilight had been chewing me out for a few hours and Shimmer looked as hornless as she had been when we got back.
Celestia sighed as Twilight posed the question, and hunger head. “It would appear that the magic Starswirl wove into the mirror are a bit more...durable than normal transformation magic. I am afraid that undoing such magic is…outside my expertise,” she admitted hesitantly.
Sunset flinched at the news and hugged herself while looking down at the floor. Not that I blamed her. Hell, it was bad enough being trapped in human land for her. The thought of coming back home had sent her into a crying fit because she thought it would give her magic again. Now she was back in Equestria and had no magic, and was pretty much the only one of her kind around.
I know she had tried to kill Twilight and all, but…a month of living peacefully with the girls and some other stuff had done wonders to curb my murderous revenge urges the hive had tried to instill in me. Plus since I was the only changeling monarch around, I could kind of tell the voices in my head to fuck off when I went under instead of just toning them down to a subliminal murmur.
“Oh,” Twilight mumbled as her pity finally made itself known for the other girl. “So…there’s nothing that’ll change her back? What about the other mirror? Can we just wait and use that?”
Sunset sunk in on herself a little, and Celestia shook her head. “No, but…I was hoping that Equestria’s experts in transmogrification magic might be able to find successes where I could not.”
I raised an eyebrow, a little impressed that there was another pony out there that might know something more about magic than Celestia of all ponies. “Okay well that’s good…wait,” I mumbled as a sneaking suspicion creeped into my thoughts. “You’re talking about me, aren’t you?”
“And I do believe Twilight had been making some headway in the field as well,” the goddess added, making me give the purple alicorn a nervous look that she reciprocated.
Meaning that she knew the same thing I did. If Celestia couldn’t remove the magic turning Sunset into a human, then messing with it using other transformation magic was a very bad idea. Tia was just grasping at straws here.
Still, I couldn’t just kill the poor girl’s hope. “We’ll see what we can do.”
Hell, for all I knew, Zecora had some kind of anti-transformation potion tucked away somewhere. I doubted I was going to be that lucky, but…it was worth a shot.
“Th-thank you,” she stuttered, and I felt Twilight’s uneasiness grow at the words.
The little alicorn looked away from the human and cleared her throat while her emotional scent continued to swirl around in a tangled mess. “No promises though…this isn’t exactly something we’ve researched or anything. It could take time.”
“I’ll prepare a transport back to your palace for the three of you at once then,” Celestia informed us.
Both me and Twilight looked up at the alicorn at the same time. “What?”
“Your palace,” Celestia repeated. “I can hardly expect the two of you to fly to Canterlot every day and do your research here.”
Well of course she’s going to live in Ponyville. Sunny’s the new one of a kind outsider in Equestria and probably one of the weirdest creatures around now with history tying her to Twilight. Where the hell else would she be? I thought to myself.
Stupid Equestrian destiny/coincidence crap.
It took us some time to get ready to go even with a palace full of servants, and Twilight went off somewhere to go collect someone. Sunset just sprawled out on the bed Twilight and I had been using, and I decided to make some small talk with Celestia after going unconscious for a minute to check up on the hive and reassure everything that I was still in charge.
“So...she doesn’t seem to be taking her situation very well.”
“Would you?” Celestia asked me. “If you returned to your homeworld in your present state.”
All things considered, they would have probably dissected me the moment I landed. But I didn’t want to tell Tia that. “...good point,” I just mumbled before thinking of another something to talk about.
“So uh, this thing you put inside me...you can take it back now,” I told her.
I actually got a creepy suspicion of what she was going to say before she opened her mouth. “No, I cannot,” Celestia replied. Then before I could say ‘uh yes you can’ she went on with “such a thing freely given cannot be so easily returned.”
“No offense Tia, but I don’t like the idea of a little piece of your core essence hanging out inside my body,” I told her.
“Yet it is there...and it may prove to be useful to you one day,” she added with a tiny smile. Which totally didn’t make THAT sound any less ominous. Seriously, you don't say shit like that in Equestria.
But I knew she wasn’t going to go on no matter how much I pressed the matter; mainly because I had a piece of Tia inside me telling me that she wouldn't. Okay, I probably could have worked out a way to get rid of it on my own. I mean, it was just magical energy when it came down to it and I ate the love flavored version of that stuff for breakfast so it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility...but...it was basically eating a piece of Tia’s soul. Really eating it.
That didn’t sit too well with me.
“Okay so...something else I’m wondering,” I mumbled while I prepared to switch subjects. “Sunset Shimmer...she’s been gone for more than just two and a half years, hasn’t she?”
It’s the only thing that made sense. I mean, there was no way in hell that Twilight couldn’t have run into her if they had both been Celestia’s students at the same time. Sure Tia had said Sunny started her apprenticeship shortly before Twilight, but considering Tia was pushing a four digit age, a short while could have been a freaking decade to her.
There were a few holes in the theory, but it didn’t seem that impossible. Hell, a few weeks ago I had been kidnapped by the boogyman. Well, almost kidnapped, I seriously doubted he expected something that was technically two months old to beat the crap out of him. But after I did get pulled into his little shadow realm and brought the CMC out of it, I found nearly a week had gone by while only a few minutes had passed for me.
“Fifteen years,” the girl on the bed said, drawing my attention. She hadn’t moved or anything, but the way she spoke with such a hollow voice filled the room.
Which meant she just extend her time in human form by about a decade, all because of what amounted to a temper tantrum two years ago, to her anyway. I thought about asking if she wanted to try going back to Earthquestria, but considering what happened with Tambelon and the fact Grogar didn’t stay dead...that didn’t really seem like a viable option.
“Hey Fae you’re back,” the familiar voice of a brash pegasus said a second before I saw her float through the door with Twilight trotting behind her. “So how was...what the hay is that thing?”
The appearance of the blue pegasus seemed to knock Sunset out of her 'bla' mood for a second, and she sat up to look at the newcomer with a dumbfounded expression. “R-Rainbow Dash?”
“Yeah?”
Sunset just gave the pegasus a surprised look. “How… What’re you doing here?”
I looked over to Twilight. “You’re explaining this one.”
Things moved pretty quickly from that point. Sunset was a little excited and weirded out by the fact that the girls she had known back on Earhquestria had pony analogues in Equestria that Twilight knew when there wasn't a Twilight Sparkle at Canterlot High. At least she and Rainbow Dash hit it off. Mostly because Sunset was new, which meant ponies would automatically be interested in her, and she already kind of knew Dash so the former pony did exactly what she needed to in order to get all friendly with her.
We got everything set up for Sunset to live with me in Everfree Castle, and she seemed to cheer up just a little when I mentioned the local witchdoctor might be able to help up with her condition. At the very least, Zecora was willing to take her on as a student because of the human's ability to reach the top shelf in the zebra's lab. Equestria apparently didn't make stuff like that with earth pony restrictions in mind.
Twilight seemed...apprehensive about the whole thing. I didn't even need my empathic abilities to tell me something was bothering her. She even stayed over at the castle for the night to make sure Sunset got settled in...and checked on the vault where I kept all the evil magic stuff that Tia had collected over the years. Her mood even managed to kill the goddess's libido. All she was up for was a few kisses.
Then she went to sleep, and I went into my comatose mind trance. At which point, things got kind of freaky.
I woke up on the couch in my living room and sat up while my brain tried to adjust to regaining consciousness. For a moment I just went through the motions that everyone has when they come out of a dream before noticing something was very wrong. Like the fact that I had fingers, elbows, knees and toes.
Because I was human.
A naked human, but still a member of the non-pony species.
And male, thank god.
But still human, which kind of gave me this weird creeping suspicion. You know the kind, its like when you're a few seconds from a freakout because you just know something bad is about to happen but you can't really go into full-on panic because you just know it's going to get worse if you do. I think it's part of that whole survival instinct that keeps people quite when all they really want to do is scream at the top of their lungs.
I licked my lips nervously, and looked around for a moment. I was back in my old house, in my old living room, and judging by the lack of windows, it was night outside. "What the hell?"
"A sentiment I share."
The familiar voice made me look off to my side to find a stranger standing off to the side of my living room's television that was in an equal amount of undress that I was and very female. Very large, and attractive female. She had to top seven feet in height and had the smoothest skin, with large breasts and wide hips that went with her waist to make a perfectly fit hourglass figure.
I'll just go out and say it...she was hands down the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen.
And I would have asked what the hell she was doing in my house, but the long hair that flowed down to her ass in a mix of green and pink shades as well as the sun tattoo on her butt made me ask something else first. "Celestia?"
The sex bomb looked up from rather distracting activity of examining her body with her hands, of which she was currently poking using her newly acquired fingers to poke her breasts with a curious expression on her face, and just stared at me. "Yes?"
"Um...what's going on?" I asked in an uneasy voice.