For Your Hands Only

by Banana Prince


The Mare in Black

Today was a ver unusual day for the town of Ponyville - past the city's standard of an unusual day, anyways. Equestria was experiencing the rise of a new ruler, a devilish centaur named Tirek. It was only the beginning of his conquest. Even though he was still gaining power, he had accumulated enough strength to impose himself as a threat. Playing it safe for now, he had taken to coming into some ponies homes to steal magic with little risk.
This led Tirek to a home where there was a mint-green unicorn who sat on her sofa, slouching and resting on her back in a very peculiar way. She stayed there, frozen, staring at her sudden intruder with absolute shock. Tirek hesitated to savor the mare's fear. As he took a single step, Lyra bolted up to Tirek from up to where she sat. Immediately, she bowed and hugged his long leg. For a moment, he was physically stunned at this unexpected reaction. With one arm, he grasped her and lifted her up to his eye-level while she still looked with gleaming eyes as if a great gift fell out of the sky.
"What do you think you're doing?" he grumbled.
"Only worshipping the great Tirek." Lyra swooned running a hoof down his hands slowly.
Tirek was suddenly interested by the fact that this unicorn that knew about a thousand year-old inter dimensional demon.
"So you've heard of me?" he asked curiously.
"Your name came up as I studied the human race."
"Please. Don't remind me of them."
"I'm sorry. I want to help you in your conquest and don't worry. I am different from Scorpan. I'm not going to turn away from you…ever."
Tirek raised an eyebrow at the mare, quizzically. Right now, he needed to be assured of victory. This unicorn seemed to want nothing but to help him with his goal. It's not like she asked for anything in return. Besides that, she does seem to have a knowledge of ancient secrets. She would be an interesting ally.
"Here." he said producing an amulet out of thin air and handed it over to Lyra. " Point it at a pony and focused your energy into it. It'll steal their power. After your finished with this village, I want you to wait in the park to give me back the amulet."
Tirek turned around and began to continue rampaging through Equestria.
Lyra giggled. She ran to her bedroom and, after twenty minutes, she reemerged, clad in black armor including a battle helmet with four curved metal horns protruding. Her outfit was complete with an elegant crimson shawl.
Walking outside, she got close to Derpy who was stuffing letters into her mailbox. Without a show of remorse, Lyra held out the amulet and drained the energy out of the mail mare. The golden aura of her was sucked out of her body as ghostly lines from her eyes and mouth, gravitating towards the scarlet gem. Derpy dropped.
Lyra laughed at how easy her wish was coming true.
"Oh, I am so going to get Tirek to give me hands!" she thought as she started to leave for town.
Derpy poked a box at Lyra along with a pen.
"Hey," Derpy moaned. "Is Bon Bon home?"
"No, sorry. Should I sign this for her?"
"Yeah, that'll be okay."
Lyra took the pen and scribbled her signature.
"Thank you." Derpy said, dragging herself along her route.
The dark overlord, Lyra slightly annoyed took the package, carrying it back in the house to place on Bon Bon's bed, her plate armor bumping into all of the walls, her cape frequently getting caught in something.
"Okay. Now I'm back on track."
And so, Lyra set out to collect power from the ponies of Ponyville as an ominous threat to Equestria so she can convince Tirek to transform her. She was thankful fro the urge to dress up for the part as it easily covered up her cutie marks and the sinister helmet hid enough of her face to conceal her identity which would be great for keeping the princesses off of herself when this whole fiasco blows over.
The only downside to Lyra's equipment is that everypony immediately ran off seeing the intimidating figure that she was coming for them. Most of them locked themselves in their houses if they hadn't already done so. Eventually, she had to jump through throughout the windows to get to the ponies, The first time took her about ten minutes. Not being a regular mare-of-action, she was hesitant. Sharp shards of glass was a mental image that naturally stopped the body. When she started to get the courage to summon more force, she found that glass panes were not as fragile as anyone would think. It took her the third time to successfully break through the window.
After she was finished draining the mare and her roommate who were hiding in the house, she was stopped by a single patrol guard.
"You're coming with me." he said.
"Or what?" Lyra spat keeping her eye on the prize, sticking to her villain persona.
The guard stopped and answered with a long "uhh…" Lyra drained him of his power and moved on to the next house.
"I really gotta talk to Celestia about letting us have baton or something…" the guard groaned.
No matter how much she was driven by the thought of being rewarded by becoming human or a centaur, Lyra found that to break into a pony's house to steal their magic was more work than one would expect. There was always the chance of being hit in the head with a frying pan (which wasn't too bad wearing a war helmet and all). If that wasn't the case, she'd spend quite a a bit of time searching for some hidden ponies and in Ponyville there's normally no more than two or three ponies per household so she had to spend a few minutes looking for at least one before she felt like she could leave. Then she quickly grew exhausted having to jump through a window twice just to steal magic from a single pony. It left her with not enough energy to chase after Scootaloo who threw a pie at Lyra while she rolled away on her scooter feeling like a hero. The worst part about the process is breaking into somepony's home and finding that whoever lived there wasn't home and finding that whoever lived there wasn't home.
After an hour of this chore, Lyra gave up and went to the park to wait for Tirek. Is isn't getting easier. Nopony was running around and Tirek isn't going to be able to tell exactly how many ponies she's drained of magic (which had to be less than twelve).
And so, as what seemed to be the motif of her life, Lyra sat on the park bench, just waiting. Soon, Tirek dropped down, now an emmencly towering figure.
"Lord Tirek. I want to talk about something."
"Oh yeah… you. Make it quick."
"Make me into a human."
"What?! No. Go away. I'm busy."
"Then make me a centaur like you. I just want hands."
"Quit being a freak." he turned away from Lyra. "Princess Twilight Sparkle!!!"
Lyra left him alone to do whatever he was up to walking away in a huff. She should've have known better than to try and bargain with ancient evil. She was still pretty peeved that she wasted her whole day stealing magic just for that.
After a short amount of walking, a number of explosions happened that sent Lyra running for safety. When the whole commotion died down, she saw Tirek speaking with Twilight Sparkle from afar. It was then Lyra got the realization that she had a new profound power source in her hooves in the form of an amulet that Tirek had forgotten to take back. She was a threat. She could make Tirek or Twilight preform the transformation spell or even get revenge on Tirek while she was at it. Straightening her cape and wiping some pie off of chest plate, she marched over to the two. She stopped when it looked like Tirek was stealing Twilight's magic. Lyra was confirmed of this when he grew instantly past forty feet tall and began to stomp around, firing lasers at the ground. Right away, Lyra jumped into the nearest tree.
"Man, I hate Mondays." was all she could really respond to this disaster with.
Tirek ignored the almost-empty field of a park, so the oak tree seemed like a safe place to hide at the moment. Lyra stayed there unable to imagine any safer place. While she layer on the branch, she realized how tired she was and napped. Why not?

Eventually she awoke to a gigantic arc of a spectrum sweeping the sky. As it passed over her, her amulet shattered and the energy that it contained floated back into Ponyville. Taking the rainbow explosion as the go-to sign that the crisis has been taken care of, Lyra took a deep sigh and dragged herself home, feeling absolutely defeated.
By the time she arrived at her house, everything began to function as normal in Ponyville again. Bon Bon had returned from her nature hike and was reading on the couch. Lyra dropped down on the couch, clearly mad and done with the day, still wearing her dark overlord armor and cape. Bon Bon looked up from her book at Lyra.
"Lyra…?"
"What?!"
"You okay?"
"No."
"Wanna talk about it?"
"No."

THE END