//------------------------------// // Chapter 5: Regarding Pranks and Unsuccessful Pranks // Story: Regarding Falling Villains // by naturalbornderpy //------------------------------// REGARDING CONTINUED REHABILITATION   “You know, I could eat you,” was the first thing I said to the blue magician that had been paired with me. After I had said such a blunt introduction, she had lowered herself into her little cape until I could barely see her eyes. I had heard she was one of the first villains to be brought back to the world glimpsing rainbows and sunshine. I had also heard something else.                  “Others call you great and powerful,” I said. “Is this true?” When she did not budge from her thin fortress of blue cloth and stars, I rolled my eyes and added, “I’m not really going to eat you. I’d imagine ponies to be tough and stringy. Plus, they move around too much.”                  Eventually I coaxed her out of her shell and she told me about her stage act. It sounded like a bore—an hour and a bit of tricks that would barely entertain a newborn. Yet, I listened to it all with rapt attention. It had been months since I had been cruelly stripped of my powers, and even the mere mention of magic nibbled at my damaged psyche. When she believed to have won me over as I asked varying questions about her show, she unveiled a deck of cards that she effortlessly levitated from hoof to hoof and around her head. I followed each card not from interest but from longing. This reformed villain right before me could spin cards with the aid of her gifts and I’d been reduced to barely moving a quill with my horn. It was times like these that I wondered what would happen should I eventually cave and cross over to the other side. Would it honestly be as horrible as I’d imagined? Were these individuals that I spent every weekend with not making the best of their situation? Granted the luxuries of every request they could want, all because they finally succumbed to the deathly poison of friendship?                  “Why did you change?” I asked her as she spun her cards around. “You weren’t bad. You took pride in yourself and let others know it. You were fooled by a device that you thought could only help you in your quest—validate your position as a worthy pony of tricks and illusions. It was not your fault things didn’t work out as they should.”                  “Well, it kind of just happened to Trixie,” she said, before she organized her deck and then glanced around hastily. Obviously I’d stepped into a topic she hadn’t been prepared to speak about. “When Trixie wore that amulet, she thought that what she was doing was right. And then when it was taken from Trixie, and when she was forgiven by everyone, it just felt right, she guesses.”                  “That’s not a good enough answer,” I told her. “You had not been yourself and before you even knew what was happening to you, everyone around you decided to be your friend without even asking if you wanted them to. Something made you accept. Something made you stay the way you are. Something made you enjoy the company of others, and I want to know what it was.”                  Trixie looked downcast, fiddling with her overlarge hat. “It’s hard to put it into words, but when it happens it only feels right. Trixie had been alone for so long and had built up so much anger and resentment for practically everyone around her. When it was lifted and Trixie found that others accepted her for who she was and everything else, Trixie decided to embrace it. There’s warmth to it. Before then, Trixie always felt cold—even when she was in her full costume.”                  I sat in silence for a time. While I couldn’t fully understand what she had been trying to get across, the thing that stuck with me most was the mentioning of her “costume.” I wore a cape and crown not because I wished to dress differently from others, only because it was what a King was supposed to do. Those garments had empowered me. Fulfilled me. I had worn them with pride but they were never what made me who I was. Yet neither did the silly dress shirt they made me wear, nor the nametag stuck to my chest.                  “Show me another trick,” I asked of her.   REGARDING PRANKS   It was during another one of my endless and listless night shifts that I caught sight of a wayward Twilight Sparkle wondering the Canterlot halls. My guard had been snoozing for some time now and I let him sleep on. Something Sentry hadn’t been around in a while and every second without his bluish mane entering the corner of my vision was enough to dance over. (I don’t dance, though.)                  “You know they get harder the further back in the book you go.”                  I had my head buried in a new text, viciously searching for the latest answer to a new crossword. By that point I had been almost three-quarters through with her book, and even the very thought of reaching its end tugged at my need to see things through until their conclusion.                  I looked up. “I’m noticing. Will you give me a new one once I’m done with this one?”                  “If you’ve been good, I might. I hear you’re making headway with the other villains in group.”                  I shook my head. “I wouldn’t call them villains. More like one-timers. None of them have led a full life of it.”                  Twilight stepped closer to my counter and I finally noticed her tired, red eyes as well as the blush in both cheeks. She must have been rubbing at them recently—although this wasn’t a topic that concerned me.                  “Why are you up this late?” I asked.                  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said, swaying from hoof to hoof. Clearly she was trying to eat up some time. “I came here to Canterlot to visit someone and now… I don’t know how much I want to see them right this moment.”                  I raised a brow. “One of the Princesses?”                  She shook her head. “I’d rather not talk about it.”                  I let it go and lifted the latest puzzle I was working on. Since I had only started minutes prior, the entire page was nearly empty. “You want to help me with this?”                  At that she smiled, and oddly enough it didn’t pain me to see it. “I’ll help you get the books but I won’t give you the answers. If that stack of texts is any indication…”—she eyed my growing pile of tomes sitting at the corner of my desk—“…you’ll need some new ones.”                  I returned the smile, making sure not to show a single tooth. (I was told in rehabilitation it looked better that way.)                  While my guard counted leaping Lunas in his dreams, Twilight and I went to the archives in search of new books. After making me return each of my old ones (she was still a stickler for organization and all around neatness), she reviewed my latest word game and scribbled down eight new books I needed to take a look at. Since I’d been at the archives almost every day for the past few weeks, I made short work of the list. That was until a book sat far beyond my reach and even that of the slide ladder below.                  Without a word Twilight flew up and scooped the dusty text before dropping it down to me. Only problem was she had done so without mentioning what she was planning on doing. If I had looked up, its heavy cover would have smacked me squarely in the face. Since I was glancing at another book, it instead bludgeoned itself onto my elongated horn, the first eighty pages or so now complete with a suspicious hole by its center.                  Before she even landed Twilight was already giggling. When I gave up trying to remove it and then left the archives with the damn book still stuck to my head, she was nearly in tears. Since I might burn this journal once I’ve come to some conclusion, it won’t hurt me to write that I didn’t much mind such a sound.                  “Do you trust me, Twilight?” I asked her out of the blue, once we’d exhausted another book from all of its finite knowledge. “You said before that you’d need to trust me for things to work, and now I’m curious if you do.”                  She hesitated before answering. “I… do. You’ve made progress. Not as fast as Celestia might have hoped, but I would still consider it progress.” She added weakly, “The number of death threats has gone down substantially.”                  I mumbled, “That’s only because I’ve run out of good terms… but I digress. If you trust me, would you help me with something?”                  Now she more than hesitated. “I won’t help you escape, Sombra. So don’t even ask.”                  I sighed. “Is that all anyone thinks I do around here? I’m not that much of a caricature, am I? No. No, that’s not what I want. Since I’ve started these overnight shifts, Luna has been pulling jokes on me. While I don’t consider them funny, for some reason she does.”                  Twilight looked a little surprised. “Luna pulling jokes? That doesn’t seem like her.”                  “What else is she going to do during the long hours of the night? And I didn’t say they were good jokes—more like attempts. Once she took a page from one of my books and turned it into a paper airplane that she flew around my head before crashing into my mane. Another time she stuck a nail to my seat and I didn’t notice until I sat down.”                  “You saw her do the nail one?”                  I shrugged. “No. But who else works during the night and has a begrudging disposition of me?”                  Twilight looked pained. “Well, actually a lot of—”                  I shoved my hoof to her mouth. “Please don’t answer that. Just trust me for once. It will be completely safe and no one will get hurt. And it will only take a moment.”                  The change in her expression told me I had finally worn her down.   REGARDING UNSUCCESSFUL PRANKS   Asking was the easy part. Seeing it through was where things got a tad tense.                  If what Luna had told me from before held any merit, each of the four alicorns had a nice chunk of my original power somewhere inside them. All I wanted from Twilight that night was a small slice to one-up the blue alicorn that had made me sit on a rubber donut for close to a week. It might surprise you to hear, but this wasn’t actually an attempt at escape at all. The amount of power I would have claimed from Twilight might have been enough to knock over some feeble guards, but I seriously doubt much more than that.                  “I’m sorry, Sombra, but I don’t know if I can.”                  “Don’t you want to trust me, Twilight?” I tried to summon my “friendship” face. I had been practicing in rehabilitation and in the mirror over the last few days, working on small muscles in my face I never knew existed. “It would be rather… friendly of you.”                  Bemused, she tightened her jaw. “I’d only give you a little, Sombra. If you try anything bad, I’d snatch it back up before you even knew what hit you.”                  “Now who’s making threats, Princess?”                  Twilight scowled at me. “Don’t say that. I hate that title.”                  I waited for her to finally lend me some of my magic. Awkwardly—and due to my height on her—she asked me to kneel beside her, where she touched her horn against mine. A second later a rush of dark colors flashed across my vision and each nerve thrummed with the energy that had passed along to me. I had been bordering on tired before that moment, but now I was charged—now I was renewed. My original plans of a harmless prank sank to the floor as I felt that small bit of magic course its way through me. When I looked at Twilight, who was viewing me with growing unease, I was silently reminded that however much magic I had been given would still never be enough.                  “Go and call Luna in and then I’ll surprise her,” I said.                  “What are you planning on doing?”                  “Surprising her.”                  “That…” Twilight stopped to rub at her temple. “Don’t make me regret this, Sombra.”                  “I think everyone will get a good laugh from it,” was the last thing I said before no one laughed for a while.                  Let’s try something different, dear reader. We’ve heard from my point of view now for far too long, so why not try it from someone else’s? I won’t ask anyone to actually write in this thing, because I really don’t expect anyone to ever get hold of it, but let’s see if I can imagine what might have gone on in someone else’s head during my well thought-out practical joke. And remember now: humor is subjective.                  I, Princess Luna, glorious ruler of the night and all things blue hear word that Princess Twilight Sparkle wishes to partake in the act of cookies and tea. Since I am stern royalty, I trot from the sky as fast as I can in search of such scrumptious treats. Tea drinking has helped solve most problems in the world, I reflect, because I obviously have nothing better to think about.                  After I land and enter the doors to the castle (all the while somehow the moon doesn’t explode or go away or drop… perhaps implicating that my job is meaningless and that I should try something more valuable with my time like woolgathering) I am hit with the most horrible of sights. “No! How? Oh please no!” I scream.                  My sister of over a thousand years lies splayed out along the marble floor. Her throat has been ripped open and the blood collects in a thick puddle surrounding her. The cause of such horror merely sits in the congealing crimson pool, bits of my sister still dripping from his muzzle. Sombra, the brash, handsome stallion that I had always thought he was stares back at me, pulling his wet lips into a grin. He says something but I refuse to hear it over my own anguish. I lunge towards him because I’m idiotic like that and still refuse to hear what he says. It sounds a lot like, “Fooled you!” but again… I’m very idiotic sometimes.                  Instead of pause and question the suave beast about how and why he did such a thing, I instead ram my long and sharp horn through his eye socket, taking his left eye to the back of his skull and right through to the other side. A torrent of blood flows from the new hole in the back of his head, drenching and tangling Sombra’s immaculate mane that I secretly wish he’d tell me how he kept so velvety. But as I pull myself away from his suddenly limp body, does the vision of my deceased sister snap away, leaving instead a pristine marble floor now littered with the cooling body of King Sombra. Only then does it come to light just how funny his joke was. I do not laugh or ever tell him what I thought of it, but I confess it to be the greatest practical joke of all time. I only regret that I’m sometimes idiotic and react without thinking coherently.                  Over a minute later, a wide-eyed Twilight emerges from the reception desk, hoof already covering mouth. Together we carry the stately villain up to my sister’s room, where we resurrect him once again.                  It seems none of us alicorns can ever learn our lessons.          REGARDING DETAILS Upon waking, my first thought is how easy the ritual to reclaim my magic had been. Now I only wondered if it could be taken without their consent.