I was dreaming.
At least, I think I was dreaming.
But it was an odd dream. Instead of a mass of memories and sensations all jigsawed together into a new form, there was...nothing. I floated in an empty void, not caring about anything.
And then, there was something else there. Not a person or an animal, or any scenery to decorate the darkness. It was just...a presence.
“No! No I shall not let this happen to me! Not again! Not so soon after being imprisoned for so long! I must escape! I must not be destroyed here!”
It wasn’t a voice that spoke, more like a feeling that had meaning.
In a daze, I looked around the empty night. “Um, hello?”
“An outsider touches my domain? YES! Fortune smiles upon me!”
I felt...something pulling at me.
“I’ll take this.”
There was a...tearing sensation. What little I had been able to tell within the dream vanished.
“And you can have that!”
Awareness quickly left me.
…
…
…
The first thing I noticed was the pain.
It hurt.
It hurt A LOT.
It hurt all over my body, but the most part of it that hurt was my head. The rest of my body felt kind of messed up. There was no sensation coming from my fingers. My wrists felt wrong. My legs were…oddly twisted. And the rest of my body just ached all over. I even hurt in places I wasn’t even sure I had. Like, there was this throbbing tingle above my head where nothing else should have been, but I hurt there too.
On top of which, I was apparently laying on something very cold and hard, and there was a weird ringing in my ears.
“Foul creature! How do you still exist?”
Or maybe it was a buzzing…
“Release me monster!”
I decided to test the functionality of my vocal cords. They hurt too by the way, sore throat. But despite that I pushed through the pain to vocalize my thoughts. “Uuuuuhhh,” I…kind of said.
Before I opened my eyes to whatever hell I had managed to stumble into the night before, before I…uh…got where I was…I tried to think just how the hell I had ended up…wherever I was.
The last thing I remembered was…
…well…
……waking up about five seconds ago, in a lot of pain.
Uh oh…that’s not good, the rational part of my brain said.
I probably would have panicked, had I not been too busy trying to catalog just what I did know.
I was a person from the planet Earth. The sky was blue. Two plus two equals four. I spoke English. Sharknado was the most over the top piece of idiocy ever made, despite its ability to draw people into watching it. Which also proved television was mankind’s greatest and yet worst invention ever. You know, the basic stuff.
Then I came to the important things, like…
My name was…
I worked as a…
My gender was…
My inability to do anything but draw a complete blank about myself was a little disturbing. Sure, I knew basic stuff about the world around me, but the stuff about me personally was…missing.
Okay, make that a lot disturbing.
I mean sure, I knew what pancakes were and their general taste. As well as facts that told me buttermilk was the best, and that pre-made stuff you heated in the microwave was total crap. But I couldn’t draw up a reason as to why I thought that, or even a single memory that backed up my theory. I just knew that pancakes were good.
So, I tried to improve my situation by opening my eyes.
It was a plan that failed rather spectacularly.
At first, the only thing I saw were a bunch of blobish shapes on a dark gray background.
Then came the voices…
“What the-It didn’t work?” the purplish blob spoke in surprise, using English. “Why didn’t it work? It was supposed to work! The book said it was supposed to work!”
The bouncing pink one was the next to speak. She had a bubbly and energetic voice. “Maybe the batteries are low. Did you bring any more magical artifact batteries Twilight?”
My memory sparked at the name, the voice, and the fact it was coming from something pink. And then I threw away the insanity of the suggestion that my mind came up with, as it was impossible. Because it was completely, utterly, impossible!
The second idea my brain came up with was much more reasonable: wherever I was, an episode of My Little Pony was playing in a room ahead of me. That was much less ‘throw me in the mental ward doc’ kind of idea. I latched onto the completely understandable idea and knew it to be true. No matter what my feelings said.
“Then let’s just zap her again!” floating blue blob yelled.
“Uh…anypony see the on switch for these things?” a orange blob asked with more than a little Southern twang on its tongue.
“Sorry but, I don’t think it works that way Applejack,” a timid voice spoke up at the edge of my hearing.
“Just great, a magical accessory that is all flash and no substance,” another accented voice chimed in, full of class.
Of course as my mind cleared, I placed the voices where they belonged, and easily decided I must be laying on the living room floor of someone’s home. So, when my vision also got cleared up, the logic centers of my brain just up and went… “Okay fuck this, I’m going on vacation.”
I found myself laying on my side in a large stone chamber that had obviously seen better days. Every single window was broken, and there were even a few vines creeping in the skeletons of the window panes that remained, none of them complete. There were columns too, nearly all of them cracked, missing major pieces that made me wonder how they were still standing, and several more broken ones. Empty braziers lined the room, with a few laying on the floor where the wall had given way. All in all, I was surprised the roof hadn’t come down yet.
And then there were the other…things in the room with me.
In front of me were…ponies.
Pastel ponies.
Little pastel ponies.
Little pastel ponies wearing fancy magical jewelry.
Little pastel ponies wearing fancy magical jewelry that I…kind of recognized.
There were six of them. Two unicorns, a pair of pegasi, and some earth ponies. They all looked very similar, with barely two inches of height difference between the mean of the lot of them, although Applejack’s hat and Pinkie’s hair might have set my measurements off a bit. Still, they weren’t cookie cutter cutouts with different colors and manes. Nor did they look like cartoons either. Although, the color of their coats were extremely colorful, as if someone had taken a marker and ran it all over their bodies.
Their heads weren’t as oversized as they should have been, but were more than just an extension of the neck like a normal horse’s was. And rounder, a lot like a person’s really. Their muzzles were a bit more defined than seen on TV as well. Hooves were more than just the end of their legs, they stood apart from the hair of the legs the ponies possessed with their smoothness, and I could detect the shiny traces of lacquer on some of them. As for the coats themselves, they were far…fuzzier looking than what a normal horse had. Meanwhile, the legs looked much different than a normal horses. They weren’t bone thin, and showed off a varying degree of muscle for each of the girls. Still, the wings were the biggest difference. They looked like…actual wings. Still kind of small for something the size of a pony, but Rainbow and Fluttershy had way more than just a handful of visible feathers.
Of course, there were some differences between the girls.
Applejack was definitely the biggest, taller by a few inches and with bulkier legs than any of the others. Her tail was also the thickest, not counting Pinkie’s poof. Her hooves were also a bit darker than the others, speaking of her lower opinion of personal looks than the rest of the group had.
The other athlete of the group was an interesting contrast to the earth pony. Like AJ, Rainbow had plenty of muscle on her. But while Applejack’s came from years of normal work that gave a natural layer of soft muscle, Rainbow’s toned body was obviously a product of careful exercise to get the right places in perfect shape. While her hair and tail looked kind of wild and unkept, the hairs that comprised her rainbow all stayed where they were supposed to be to keep from turning the thing into a seizure-causing mess.
As for Fluttershy, it was easy to see how she had gotten a modeling job. Her legs were slimmer than the rest of the girls, with a coat that was obviously well cared for and a mane with the same amount of attention put into it. Unlike Rainbow, I couldn’t see any obvious tangles in her mane or tail. She also had a full butt that was nice and round without being so big as to be called ghetto…not that I was looking all that long of course, but people tended to notice these things. Her wings also seemed to be a bit…thicker than the ones belonging to the other pegasus’s. It looked as if there was an extra layer of feathers or something.
Now Rarity, she did more than just give her coat and mane some attention. Even in the dark chamber we were in, she seemed to shimmer with fabulousness…or maybe it was just the tiny bit of glitter in her makeup. As far as Fluttershy’s coat and mane care was beyond Rainbow’s, Rarity’s was beyond hers. Fluttershy might have paid some attention to her looks, but Rarity had put in some monumental effort to curl her mane and tail so perfectly there wasn’t a hair out of place, while her horn ended in a sharpened point.
Then there was Pinkie Pie. She had a bit of pudge on her, and the most generous rear. It wasn’t that she was fat, not by a long shot, but…out of all the girls, she definitely had the most…extra size. Then there was her hair, the curly mass of messy mane and matching tail made cotton candy seem dull in comparison, but still managed to hang down past her withers while bouncing around thanks to the spring in the pony’s step.
Finally, there was Twilight Sparkle. She looked to be everything anyone would have expected from a little pony. I couldn’t say for sure, but I think she was actually smaller than her friends in…well, every measurable way but one. She was shortest of the group by an inch, and definitely lacked any sort of physique that went within a hundred miles of AJ or RD. Even Rarity and Fluttershy had thicker legs. In fact, the only thing the bookworm had going for her aside from the adorable mane that hung around the right sight of her neck was that her horn seemed a bit bigger than Rarity’s from the base up.
“Oh, you have GOT to be kidding me,” I said in a voice that surprised me. Although it was the first time I had heard my own voice, a very tiny part of me was confused. As if it was wrong somehow. Too deep. Too…sexy.
What I was seeing was not just improbable, but completely impossible. My holy memory may not have been the best of things, but…I was pretty damn sure that My Little Pony was a cartoon show, not…whatever the hell I was experiencing at the moment. “This has got to be some kind of dream.”
“If only.”
The tiny buzzing in my ear distracted me for a minute.
“Quick girls, form up!” Twilight shouted. “If the first attack weakened Nightmare Moon, then the second is sure to finish her off!”
My eyes widened at the implications of Twilight’s statement, and the fact that she was looking straight at me.
Which made me in turn look down at myself. Admittedly, not the best move when the Harmony Cannon is being pointed in your general direction, but…I was so banged up I could barely move. And what I saw…freaked me out. Freaked me out by a lot.
Okay, I may not have known my name, gender, occupation, or anything else about my past. But I was pretty damn sure I was human! But when I looked down at myself, I got…hooves.
Which of course made me look at the rest of me. It hurt a bit for me to sit up and look around, but…I somehow managed.
From what I could see, I was a mare from the show, if a bit more lifelike. Jet black hair covered my body, and I was wearing two pairs of oversized horseshoes that fit more like a slipper than anything nailed on. Like Rainbow, my body was sleek and had a defined musculature in the legs, with wings that seemed streamlined for speed and maneuverability. In fact the only part of me that didn’t seem all that toned was...my ass. It looked a little bigger than the average pony’s.
Still, the size difference between me and the others made everything a matter of perspective. My legs were thicker than Applejack’s, my wings were bigger than Fluttershy’s, my horn was definitely longer and sharper than Twilight’s and Rarity’s (not to mention the slightly different, less geometric design it followed as opposed to the ones being sported by the unicorns) and my butt was big enough to squash any of the girls in front of me underneath. As for my mane, it was… Okay, my mane wasn’t poofier than Pinkie's, but it did have its own special qualities. It wasn’t what I was expecting though. The thing didn’t just breeze around in some weird transparent mess without showing a single strand like the show, my hair did sparkle like the night sky, and the hairs did glow slightly with a soft blue light.
In short, I was in the body of Nightmare Moon. The Bringer of Eternal Night. She Who Should Not Be Named. Legendary Eater of Generous Amounts of Candy One Night Out of the Year!
“Okay girls, let’s do it!”
And I just realized that the impossibility of the situation might have made me NOT pay attention to the six mares in front of me. The mares wearing some interesting jewelry that was pretty much the Equestrian equivalent to the Infinity Gems. Glowing gems, that brought all the girls together into a specific configuration in the air.
Cue Twilight opening her eyes and displaying super magic light and… Yeah, I was screwed.
Panic overtook me. So despite trying to do the smart thing like run away, try and use some nifty magic I was pretty sure Nightmare Moon was capable of, or just getting up to ram one of the girls with my very sharp and deadly horn, I…screamed and raised my hooves in a defense that would most absurdly block an attack from a weapon that could bring down Tirek while he was running on about eight-five percent of Equestria’s magic.
Oh, I also chanted a powerful defensive spell as the rainbow shot up and around towards me. “No! No wait please don’t-” was all I managed to get out before the light of Harmony enveloped me.
As what was probably one of the primordial forces of creation consumed me, I…
…felt pretty good, actually.
The aches and pains of my body quickly faded to nothing, as did the pounding in my head. On top of which, the magic filled me with a soothing calm that wiped away my fear of being atomized, and energized my limbs with a newfound strength and made what I think was my horn tingle with energy.
I…wasn’t being destroyed by the Elements of Harmony.
I was being healed and energized by them!
Bathed in the light of the rainbow, I sifted around, getting a feel for my body for the first time. It felt…alien, and yet…easy to move. I guess a thousand years of muscle memory tends to help with those sorts of things…if that was what indeed it was. Whatever the reason for my body’s easy adaptability, I quickly discerned the difference between the controls for my forelegs and wings, which was…weird since the feathers on the end of my wings functioned almost like fingers, but I had to use unfamiliar muscles to get them going.
Then, I stood up.
Let me tell you, going from biped to quadruped didn’t help for the balance side of things. Sure, you’re probably going ‘but you’ve got four legs!’. Well…hind legs that don’t work the way they’re supposed to…or exist to begin with…don’t make anything any easier. On top of which…EVIL OVERLORD HORSESHOES WERE NOT MADE FOR WALKING ON STONE!
As soon as I got up, my front hooves slid forward and I nearly ended up falling flat on my face! In fact, the only reason I could hold onto my cool card was the fact that the lightshow imitated by the Elements of Harmony was a benevolent thing that kept anyone else from seeing me stumble.
Then, once I was upright and able to hold my position, the rainbow died out, and the mane six collapsed onto the floor. Each one of them was either panting heavily, or looked about ready to pass out from whatever strain using the Elements had put on them.
Apparently spared from death thanks to some cosmic fluke once again, I threw my head back and laughed in glee. “MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” Which, okay…might have sounded just a teensy bit evil.
But what the hell did I care?
I was alive!
Healed!
And apparently in the body of some kind of supreme horse deity that was immune to the one thing that actually had the power to stop me!
“N-No!” Twilight Sparkle weakly muttered from her position on the floor as she placed her hooves on the floor to rise up…and quickly collapsed back onto the ground. “This isn’t possible. The Elements of Harmony…I discovered the spark, I figured out that it’s the six of us together to use the Magic of Friendship, so why…why isn’t it working?”
And then, full of a dark glee, I had an idea.
A wonderful idea.
A wonderful, yet awful idea.
Yes, I had a wonderfully awful idea.
“Girls!” she called out, panic creeping into her voice. “Girls we have to get up and try again!”
While the other mares moaned, groaned, and announced how they were collectively party pooped, I moved forward a step.
Ever so slowly, I moved forward.
“Twilight!” Applejack spoke up as she also tried to get up. To her credit, she actually managed to stand a few seconds before a single step took all of her energy and she collapsed.
Using extreme caution, I moved forward some more.
“Run!” Rainbow shouted before she rolled onto her stomach and tried to flap her wings enough to get airborne. One inch later, Dash crashed back into the ground.
Careful not to fall on my face, I slowly crept closer.
Rarity’s horn flickered with magic, and then died out.
And I reached my destination.
“P-please,” a horse whispered from the yellow pegasus. “Please…don’t.”
“Did you really think you were a match for me?” I asked evilly as I raised my mighty hoof and positioned its shadow over Twilight’s prone form.
Twilight didn’t reply. Like Rarity, her horn sparked on and off for a few seconds before letting out a tiny spark of magic, and then…she just stopped. Whatever last minute reserve her magic had held had run out. She was completely out of gas, and helpless.
“Now, it is time for your PUNISHMENT!” I gleefully exclaimed getting ready to bring my hoof down and…boop her on the nose. Seriously, the big evil overlord standing over her helpless opponent, just to do a nose gag. It was going to be priceless!
And so I drove my mighty appendage down in at a furious rate, and…
“NO! I SHALL NOT LET YOU HARM THE LITTLE ONES MONSTER!”
…blinked when I was overcome with a weird tingling sensation filled my foreleg. The thing jerked far to the left and completely threw me off balance while a new voice reverberated in my skull.
“What the fuuuu-buck?” my mouth managed as I lost my footing and crashed onto the hard stone.
Eye to eye with Twilight, and confused as hell, I felt the tingling move to my mouth. “Hurry Twilight Sparkle!” my own fucking mouth spoke without me willing it to move. “You must gather your friends and flee this place. I can only regain control of one part of my body from the demon at a time, and must resume my hold on her horn before she regains her concentration, lest she destroys you all with a thought! Now run! Run as fast as you can!”
As the tingling in my mouth stopped, and the feeling in my horn resumed, I started to shake off the freaky feeling of something else moving my body while getting to my feet, or hooves.
“P-Princess Luna? Was that you?” Twilight asked weakly.
I groaned, and then looked at the prone purple pony in front of me as I laid up on my stomach. “Ugh…yeah, that makes sense,” I mumbled. If I was Nightmare Moon at the beginning of FiM, then Luna would be the creature I was…possessing. And despite the fact that I was currently inside of Best Princess, I didn’t feel all that good about it.
Brony clop fantasy aside…which you know, I totally didn’t follow since I was one of those non-sex with ponies types…the fact that I was basically holding Luna hostage was just plain wrong.
I didn’t want to hurt Luna! Getting a few jabs in with Celestia might have been fine, but whoever picked on Wittle Woona deserved to burn in the fiery pits of Hell!
“Hey Luna, you there?” I asked while looking upwards just a little bit. It was the best way I could act like I was talking to my own head. “Luna?”
“Do not address me monster! I told you centuries ago any conversations between the two of us were over!”
I sighed at the voice in my head (or was I the voice in her’s?) and slowly stood up. “Um yeah okay, but…mind if I point something out real quick?” I asked.
“…what is it?” the disembodied voice in my head asked.
“Well it’s just…I’m not going to hurt them,” I added after a few seconds. Admittedly, I could have told them I wasn’t Nightmare Moon, but… Considering I didn’t know anything about myself…I could have been Nightmare Moon. But…what with the whole fact that I knew everything around me should have also been just a cartoon…I wasn’t really betting on that being the explanation.
Plus, telling them I wasn’t Nightmare Moon would just confuse the hell out of everyone. I mean, how could me, they, or anyone prove I wasn’t? I was still kind of hijacking Luna’s body. A process I wasn’t exactly sure how to end.
Or...what would happen to me if I did leave.
I mean sure, taking over Luna’s body was a bad thing, but...I couldn’t just give it up. After all, where in the hell would that leave me?
“Pardon?” Luna asked.
“Huh?” Twilight chimed in.
I blinked, and looked down at the little unicorn beneath me. Now that I was fully erect, she looked…so tiny. And adorable. I had to fight the urge to squee as I used all of my willpower to remain in control and keep my authoritative voice. “Oh, I’m talking to Luna,” I explained to Twilight before looking back up towards my brain. “And I’m saying, I’m not going to hurt them.”
Once again, didn’t want to touch on the Moony subject. I mean, for all I knew, I could have been Nightmare Moon given a information of another reality before having his/her/its memory wiped by the Elements to confuse it on what it should do!
Well, okay…that seemed way too complicated.
“What trickery is this?” Luna demanded.
“What do you mean what trickery? How in the heee-ay!” my mouth said as it forced me to use a ponyism rather than a real word, and blinked. That...had been weird.
“I already have your bucking body!” That time, I got through just fine with my non-curse word. “What possible reason could I possibly have for telling you I’m not going to hurt them when I am so close to Twilight I could smash her-ahhhh!” My logical argument ended quickly as I threw out my forelegs, like I was throwing out a pair of hands to help my position in the debate, and fell flat on my face. I also discovered the downside to having pointy teeth all around. “GAAAAH! My tongue! I bit my tongue!”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Luna’s voice said inside of me.
I quickly pushed my way back onto my withers, and reached up to try rather unsuccessfully feel for damage. Because…you know…hooves. “Oh clum on!”
Then, I felt something pat me on the back. “There, there. Open your mouth and let me see.”
The presence of a yellow pegasus floating in the air beside me was…odd. But I did as I was told. Apparently, my few seconds of banter had enabled some of the girls to catch a little breather.
“Fluttershy!” Rainbow Dash called out as she got to her hooves. “What’re you DOING?”
The pegasus in question looked over to Dash in confusion. “But she’s hurt Rainbow,” Flutters replied before she looked back to me. “Now come on, I won’t bite.”
I did as I was told, again. When a magical talking horse as sweet a Fluttershy asks you to open your mouth for an examination, you don’t question it You just do it.
“You’re not kidding,” Luna deadpanned while Fluttershy gave me a look-over. “Are you?”
“Well, you look okay to me,” the sweetest little pegasus informed me with a little smile.
I pulled Luna’s tongue back in and sighed. “Look, even with Luna holding down my magic, don’t you think I would have done something to you girls by now?”
Twilight frowned as she slowly pushed herself to her feet along with the others. With as slow as they were going, they were obviously barely able to move, but it was better than they had been a few seconds ago. “Okay…if you’re not here to hurt us…then what did you do to Princess Celestia?” she demanded a bit too strongly for a pooped little purple pony that was facing off against her species’ goddess of eternal darkness.
I…blinked. That was a pretty good question, actually. And one I didn’t really have an answer to… “I uh…don’t really know.”
“WHAT?” several voices with mouths, and one without a mouth shouted at the same time.
With half a dozen ponies glaring at me, I pointed over to where I had been standing a moment before. “Look, the first thing I remember is coming to over there. Before that…I got nothing,” I told the girls in front of me. “I-I know some basic stuff, like how to talk and junk but…I can barely walk! You saw me just now!”
Just then, a blur of motion put the face of a blue pony all over my field of vision. “A likely story!”
In response to the sudden appearance of Rainbow Dash, I did what any normal person would do. I screamed like a girl and fell backward off my ass, and onto my back. After propping myself up on an elbow, I held out one hoof to ward her away. “W-Wait! Don’t hurt me!” Hell, Dash kicked a dragon big enough to eat her in a single gulp. I think she was stupid enough to mess with an all powerful goddess of the night.
But, my awesome display of power must have terrified her into submission. Because a second later, Dash landed and looked over to her friends. “Uh…yeah. This really isn’t like the monster my dad said would come and eat me if I didn’t do all my pushups when I got done with my chores.”
All of a sudden, there was a tingling in my mouth, and I was speaking in a much calmer tone. “Indeed young pegasus. As this creature has not tried to usurp my horn once since regaining her health, I must conclude there is something else going on.”
“What makes you say that?” Pinkie Pie asked.
For a few seconds, nothing happened. The tingling stayed in my muzzle, and I actually managed to still move my mouth around despite that. Then half a minute passed, and Luna spoke through me again. “Because I have just given the Nightmare ample time to destroy you all by relinquishing my hold on my horn…and all it has been doing is staring at the lot of you.”
Twilight gulped, probably at the fact that the princess she was meant to save just sat around and gave the bad guy, even if it was me, ample opportunity to blow them all to dust. “Okay then…um…Princess Luna, what do we do now?” she asked.
“I would suggest our next course of action to be the release of my sister from the lunar prison that Nightmare Moon consigned her to upon returning to Equestria,” Luna explained with the voice we sort-of shared.
Everyone continued to look at me…or maybe here…which was…us?
Oh boy, was this going to get confusing.
But at the very least, I had just found out that Celestia did in fact not ditch her country and abandon the entire world to eternal darkness at the hands of her little sister because of her inability to fight Luna. She had just been thrown into Turnabout Penitentiary.
“Sooooo…how exactly do we do that?” Twilight asked.
Luna sighed, and looked down at her shoulder. “Well, I’ve given up my hold on my horn. Go on and let her out already.”
Despite Luna laying claim to my face, I managed to look up and blink. “Oh…you’re talking to me,” I realized before I looked back down at myself. “Okay…um…how exactly do I do that?”
Everyone blinked at me, and Luna was silent for several moments.
Then, my mouth started to move on its own once again. “Oooooh, something tells me this is going to be a long night.”
If you ever hear a magician tell you that magic is simple, punch him in the jaw for me. Because it’s not. Magic is hard. And what makes it even worse is that it’s hard to explain too.
When it came time to explain to me how to let Celestia out, Luna tried taking control of our horn again, only to find that she didn’t have enough control over that aspect of her body to do much besides make me feel a little weird and levitate tiny objects. In short, she couldn’t do magic. Powerful magic at least. Which was what we needed to release Celestia.
Which left it up to me.
Don’t worry, it didn’t take some twenty odd years for me to complete my magical education and raise the sun.
In fact, it only took sixteen...days.
Or hours, but they sure as hell FELT like days.
It started out with some basic lecturing by Twilight that was all technical, which Luna felt the need to correct when she thought the unicorn got it wrong and a more ‘emotional’ approach was needed to the explanation. Of course this was kind of hard since Twilight thought I was the one talking half the time, and you NEVER correct the teacher.
And if you’re looking for an explanation of just how the hell magic works in Equestria...well…
You focus on the magic flowing through your body (it’s like this little goosebumpish thing you’re only really aware of if you look real hard for it) and then slowly push into your horn. Then, you focus on an emotion, how the outcome of the spell you want to do makes you feel. After that, you use that emotion, while at the same time clear your head to lay down a complex artistic design in your head that has a big mathematical formulae behind it. But we’re not done yet! Because even after you’ve got all this energy, an emotion to move it, and a formula to tell it exactly what to do, you’ve got to draw the thing using the magic you’ve stored in an even output before completing the formula by connecting the last line of the artistic shape with the first point that you started drawing with, all without lifting your pen from the proverbial paper!
If it wasn’t for Luna’s help in guiding my magic...I really doubted Tia would have been getting an early release. But hour, after grueling hour that everyone ELSE got to sleep through, including Twilight when Luna got tired of her nonsensical yammering, I finally managed to cast Lunar Prison Unlock!
Of course, we did a bit more than just study for sixteen hours straight. We took study breaks to help me digest the info, talked a bit, and everyone got to know eachother a lot better than what five ponies could get out of a one hour hike through a creepy forest that kept everyone on edge. By the time everything was finished, the girls had even gotten over their reservations of me...and Luna.
Oh, and with a few hours of instruction before we got started on the main spell, I had learned to walk around without falling on my face thanks to Luna helping me guide my legs around, channel magic through my horn to either throw it around wildly in a burst blew shit up with her walking me through it, or make a good night light. Learning telekinesis would probably take some time.
And then, once the spell was cast...
Glorious sunlight came over the hillside, and soon thereafter, there was a bright light that shot forth from it to come through the window and into the ruined castle. I took that as my cue to find some shadows to duck into under instructions from Luna.
As soon as the other big pony appeared, Twilight Sparkle let out an excited gasp, and ran forward while everyone else had the respect to bow. “Princess Celestia, you’re alright!”
The new pony was everything I was expecting her to be and then some. Okay sure, Celestia hadn’t really done jack shit for Equestria when it came to protecting it from anything, going so far as to stay inside Ponyville’s town hall while a rampaging monster that looked like the unholy union between a grizzly, a panda, and a bee nearly totaled Ponyville.
Still, despite her lack of a track record, Celestia managed to look like one hell of a pony. The Princess of the Sun was built like a brick house, with slightly thicker legs than what I possessed, and a fuller body with poofier wings. Whereas I seemed to have been designed as sleek and fast, Celestia definitely had a brawler’s physique.
“Twilight Sparkle, my faithful student,” she said before embracing her with a neck-hug. “I knew you could do it.”
As soon as the embrace was ended, Twilight stepped away and blushed. “T-Thank you princess, but...it wasn’t me who freed you.”
Celestia let out a melodious laugh and looked over to the ponies showing their divine ruler the proper respect due to something like her. “Yes. I see you had a little help along the way. It looks like you followed my instructions, and made some friends.”
“Um...no,” Twilight admitted. “I mean, these ponies are my friends...especially now that I’ve spent so long talking to them and we’ve really got to know each other while the seal on your prison was being unlocked, but-”
“Yes,” she interrupted. “You unlocked the Elements of Harmony, and defeated Nightmare Moon. But you couldn’t have done it alone. You-”
Twilight cleared her throat. “Well actually, we did use the Elements on Nightmare Moon, but...they uh...sort of just...didn’t do anything but make her stronger.”
Celestia didn’t even seem to notice Twilight’s words as she smiled and nodded. “Yes, you used to Elements to make her strong-wait...WHAT?”
I could hear Luna giggling in the back of my head as Twilight explained things to the flabbergasted alicorn. “Well, we unleashed the power of the Elements and...while the first blast seemed to hurt her a little, the second time around, she absorbed the magic and actually undid the damage our first harmonic blast caused and might have gotten a bit of a power boost from it.” Luna said it felt more like a lasting recharge, something that gave me plenty of gas to run on without upping my horsepower, but this description probably worked better.
“She-she what?” Celestia replied, obviously unnerved. Apparently, it was hard to keep your composure when a plan you’ve been counting on for hundreds of years went ary.
“I’m pretty sure they made her stronger Princess,” Twilight theorized as she tapped a hoof to her chin.
“S-Stronger? How is that-wait… Twilight, you did manage to defeat her though, in the end, right?” Celestia asked, her all-knowing mask now completely gone and more than a trace of worry in her voice.
Sticking to the script that we had to trade Two Sister Castle arcane secrets for, Twilight smiled. “Oh, I..uh...didn’t! In fact, she’s still here. See for yourself,” the unicorn said as she gestured to the area behind Celestia with a hoof.
The white alicorn whirled around, a look of fear upon her face as she looked at us, a feral smile upon our own ‘visage’ as we sauntered forward. “How is this… But if I am free, then why do you still…” Celestia stopped and looked back to the unicorn. “Twilight, take your friends and run! I don’t know how long I can hold her, but-what are you doing?”
Even with her face prostrated on the ground, Twilight winced at Celestia’s question when the alicorn looked back to the unicorn. “Um...bowing?” she said nervously before looking up and...snapping. “I’m sorry Princess! I used the Elements of Harmony like you want me to, but they didn’t do anything!”
“Twilight-”
“Well, they did do something, just not what we thought they would do!” Twilight insisted as she stood up to run to the space between me and Celestia. “And now, Nightmare Moon isn’t going to hurt us!”
Celestia voice took on a twinge of annoyance. “Twilight-”
“We can already prove it!” the unicorn told her while the alicorn slumped and sighed with a resigned look that said she had endured several of such things in the past. “After my friends and I used the Elements, we were helpless and she could have easily smashed my head in, even with Princess Luna restraining most of her magic...which I guess explains why Nightmare Moon didn’t just blow us all into dust or something when she first appeared! But now the more I think about it, the more I’m positive that the Elements did exactly what they were supposed to do.”
“They were supposed to purify my sister of the evil within her!” Celestia insisted, anger apparent in her voice.
Twilight grinned and nodded. “And they did!” she exclaimed before becoming hesitant. “They just um...purified Nightmare Moon...too.”
For a few seconds, I was pretty sure Celestia’s brain had blue screened. Then, she let out a long sigh and looked over to me. “If this is true, then why do you still hold my sister hostage?”
My head looked to my right shoulder. “Shall I explain to Sister?” Luna asked.
I turned my head to the left. “Go for it.”
After letting Luna move our head back to look at Tia, I just kicked back and watched the show. “As part of the purification of Nightmare Moon’s evil she also lost all knowledge of her evil acts, or how to perform them. That apparently includes how it possessed me, as well as how to leave my body.”
Celestia frowned with a face that told me she wasn’t buying any of what Luna said. “And how am I supposed to believe that you are indeed Luna, and not Nightmare Moon simply impersonating her?” How she could think that after she had been released from lunar imprisonment, I didn’t know.
“Sister,” Luna spoke through our mouth. “Must I remind you that Nightmare Moon has no access to my memories at all? Otherwise, she would have taken the one thing that could have defeated her the first time you battled her.”
As her frown didn’t disappear, I could see Celestia wasn’t following. “Yes. But what does that have to do with-”
“The last time you wet the bed was-”
Celestia’s eyes widened and her wings shot out wide. “Okay okay! That’s…” She cleared her throat and stepped around, regaining her air of nobility.
Luna smirked. “If you require more proof, I could tell your subjects how you lost your first coltfriend, or perhaps how long it was until you finally lost your maidenh-”
“THAT’S QUITE ENOUGH LUNA!” Celestia shouted before her cheeks flushed red. “Now come here so I can hug you, and we can...figure out what to do with your...passenger.”