//------------------------------//
// Monster 
// Story: Fixing Flashlight 
// by Neroson40 
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	When I started searching for Twilight, I thought we would really need help. I didn’t want to scare Princess Celestia that Harmony was threatening Equestria, who knows how often she’s seen that? Probably not in a thousand years. I also considered Luna, but she didn’t know Twilight well enough and would probably just go to Celestia for advice on the situation. No, it had to be someone I knew who knew Twilight, and would know how to break it to Celestia if it came to that… who better to ask, then, than her brother?
Tenebrae used some sort of dark magic (or something along those lines) to teleport us outside the Crystal Empire. Something felt off when I got there. I don’t remember putting on my armor, or owning anything light in what I have as a sorry excuse of a wardrobe, but I felt clothed… even my hind legs. Speakin’ o’ which, I couldn’t feel the ground beneath my front hooves. Wait… did I still have hooves!? I looked down at myself… and tensed up. In place of my front hooves I had what Twilight called Hands. In place of my hind hooves I had what Twilight called feet. I moved very stiffly to the nearest reflective surface. The… thing I saw looking back at me I only ever saw in a photo with Twilight before. And she wasn’t then what she should be now. 
Even so, looking back to the last time I saw the photo, the Flash sentry in it dressed a lot differently. His pants weren’t so… baggy, his shirt covered his shoulders, he didn’t wear a scarf, and he certainly didn’t have an odd plank on the back of his waist. I looked like the Flash Sentry that Twilight fell in love with in the first place everywhere else. The face, the eyes, the hair, I was even his height by what Twilight told me about him.
“Tenebrae!” I shouted. “What happened to me!?” A shadow passed between me and the crystal in front of me, revealing Tenebrae when it let up.
“Fighting the forces of Harmony as a pony is very ineffective,” Tenebrae said. “The last Guardians of Chaos made that very clear, so we gave them an alternate form based on those found in another world. Let’s leave it at that for now.” I wanted to ask more questions, but I remembered why I was here. Tenebrae taught me how to run in this “human” form and I made my way to the crystal palace. I saw one of my	friends standing guard at the entrance to the castle.
“Overload!” I said to him. He did not ease his grip on the spear pointed at my chest. “Overload! It’s me, Flash Sentry! I need to talk to Emperor Shining Armor!” Overload looked a little shocked at my claim to be his old friend.
“How can I be sure you’re really flash sentry!?” He said sternly. “You may look like him but he’s a pony last I checked and not… whatever the hay you are!” that was easy to remedy. I remembered one time he came into my quarters sleepwalking, and he told me the biggest secret he could’ve about a mare in the guard. I didn’t want the other guard who was at the gate to hear this; in fact I didn’t want anypony knowing that I knew this, so I leaned in and whispered it in his ear. “go right in,” He said quietly. I ran in, at first it was just to get the news to Shining as fast as possible… then the rest of the guards saw that I was running and decided to chase the monster with unknown intentions. They tried to tackle me when I finally stopped in front of Shining’s office, but their attacks were very… sluggish, stiff, and easy to avoid with my new body… I liked the change, but I still couldn’t wait to get back to my own body. There are things my body could do that this one could not.
“Sorry guys,” I said before I knocked on the door to Shining’s office. “Shining! It’s me, Flash!”
“How can I be sure you’re not the monster that’s been terrorizing the Crystal Empire!?” I heard Shining yell from the other side.
“Shining,” I started with the only monster logic I knew when it came to mimicking voices. “If a monster were in the Crystal Empire and wanted to trick you using my voice, would he admit to being the monster, like I’m sort of doing right now!?” Shining was quiet. Then the door opened and Shining got a good look at me. “I know, I freaked out when I saw this too. But that’s not why I’m here!”
“Okay… why-” Shining started, but I interrupted him.
“Get comfortable, preferably sitting down,” We went to his desk which he sat behind. But I had to remove the plank on my back to actually sit down in front of it. “Your sister’s been kidnapped.” I let that sink in, gave him a chance to say something. But nothing was said that I was expecting. I was expecting “Who did this?” “How did this happen?” or even “How could you let this happen?”
What Shining said was; “Did you inform Princess Celestia?”
“I wasn’t entirely sure how she’d react to the balance of Chaos and Harmony being disrupted… from Harmony’s side.” Shining looked at me funny.
“Where’d you get that idea?”
“From me,” Tenebrae said. There was a shadow passing next to the desk and Tenebrae was right there. Shining just stared at this cat-dog creature with a strange appendage on the tail (I now recognized that as a hand). “And my brothers and I got the idea from Discord, who got the idea from Celestia, so she knows about the situation.”
“What is this Thing?” Shining asked. I told him what Tenebrae told me. Shining went stoic and looked at me with a near blank face. “Why do you trust him? His power threatened Equestria on multiple occasions, why trust him now?”
“Because he earned it returning my memories.” I told him everything I remembered just to make sure I got it right, and nothing was off.
“That’s all the memory he returned?” Shining said. “What about the bad stuff?”
“I remembered that on my own. Tenebrae’s telling the truth, I know it.”