Chapter 2
~ Shantae: Present Day ~
Now, given those two rather violent titles, Blood Dancer and the Butcher of Malachite Hill, you might have expected me to put up a fight and live up to my legacy. After all, by all appearances I had just attacked Celestia’s student and her... brother. I’m sure this newcomer Princess and the unicorn—bearing the cursed touch of Sombra—both expected me to put up a fight. I could probably take them both, too.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t fancy myself the arrogant sort. That being said, when Sombra made me into his weapon, he taught me to pick my prey carefully. Here was an alicorn, probably not an alpha like Celestia and Luna, that looked to be on the verge of collapse. Her unicorn companion looked slightly better off, but only marginally. Without access to his magic, he had only his size and physique of his side. A makeshift Pikeball would probably have been enough to keep him off me. Really, the only threat in the room was Twilight Sparkle and her young drake friend.
Needless to say, I don’t think either of them expected me to get down on my knees, place my wrists together and offer them to the pair. “Alright, I surrender.” I glanced over my shoulder at Twilight. “If you’re looking for what I think you are, you’re right on the money. Remember, ‘Beware the lore door; it tells only lies.’”
The male unicorn glanced at Twilight and nodded. “He’s coming, Twily and I don’t think Cady can keep it up much longer.” Turning to me, he added, “I can handle her, even without my magic.” Uh-huh, you keep telling yourself that, boy.
Even as he strode toward me, a pair of manacles suddenly in his mouth, Twilight nodded, and approached the throne. “Be careful, Shining Armor,” she said. “She seems docile, but her magic isn’t to be underestimated—she burned through Spike’s scales.”
I rolled my eyes, ignoring Shining Armor as he struggled to fit the manacles around my bracelet-encased wrists using only his hooves and mouth. Watching that Twilight mare wield dark magic to reveal the entrance to my former master’s inner sanctum was far more interesting. That kind of raw power and talent—and she looked so young—could lead to great or terrible things. I just hope when the time comes she does not become a threat herself. Sombra was corrupted by the darkness, after all.
As a spiral stairwell appeared before the throne, and Twilight descended into the depths of Sombra’s domain, my captors of choosing dragged me out of the throne room by my shackles. The stallion was grumbling something through the chain he gripped between his teeth, but in spite of it, he seemed more concerned for this mare, this lesser princess. She was clearly expending herself doing something, even if nothing was readily apparent. Had Celestia and Luna...?
“I’m curious, sir and madame,” I said, quickening my pace until the chain had some slack. “Where are the Sisters now?”
The alicorn—Cady, he’d called her, although it was probably a pet name—gave me a curious look before diverting toward a large window. “Celestia and Luna are in Canterlot; why?”
Canterlot? What? Where in the blazes was that? “But that means they aren’t here. That’s impossible; I was just fighting them, unless...” I mused aloud. ”Why flee the field of battle when the upper hand was theirs?”
I joined the mare at the window, ignoring the dirty look Shining Armor was giving me. “What...?” I stared out at the city below, unsure of what exactly I was seeing. It was definitely the Crystal Empire, but at the same time, I was looking down at a completely different world. The sky was pure blue, lacking the telltale orange haze of Sombra’s influence. Likewise, all of the crystal houses were clear, without any of the corruption of his presence. It was just pure. Ponies were even holding a faire!
Placing my hands on the window, I allowed myself a smile. “They’re free! They’re all really free!” Celestia and Luna had won, and now the Crystal Empire was free. They... they... This was it then. They had to ‘deal’ with Sombra still, and then I was going to be tried as well. My hands slid down the transparent crystal, and I suddenly found myself needing to wipe my eyes. “I’m happy for them.”
The princessly pink pony beside me shook her head. “They aren’t free yet,” she said, nodding towards the edge of the Empire’s boundaries. “Until we have the Crystal Heart and we can fill it with love and hope, they will never be free.”
“But Celestia and Luna won, didn’t they? I don’t understand. Sombra’s been defeated, hasn’t he?” I tapped the glass with one of my long nails. “The Empire wouldn’t look like this unless he had been!”
“They almost did defeat him that day, but,” she answered, “he escaped, taking the entire Crystal Empire with him.”
“He didn’t...” I whispered, feeling my legs turning to rubber. “When Sombra held the reins to my free will, he told me once that he would never allow Celestia and Luna to take these people from him. He would sooner relinquish his hold and conquer them all over again, at a time when the Empire had been forgotten. To make it possible required the most heinous of sacrifices...”
Without warning, I rounded on Shining Armor slapping him across the face with my ponytail—not with enough force to kill, but enough to stun and perhaps concuss, though. See, Shantae—the character I’d become when displaced here—had a really unique primary attack: her hair was strong and struck like a steel bar.
The end of the chain fell from his mouth, and I caught it between my hands. As I darted off through the halls, I called back to them, “I’m sorry!” There was only one place I could go, as I ran unhindered through the empty castle. It was a place I knew very well, having spent four years of my life there, whenever I wasn’t playing pet or being trained as a guard dog. It was a room in the very depths of the castle that held close to two hundred ponies.
I barely even felt the impact in my knees as I leapt down half-flights of stairs, and the novelty of my breasts freely bouncing as I ran barely even crossed my mind. I didn’t care that were Sombra here now, he would do the most awful of things to me if he caught me running in the castle. Despite my hopes that he hadn’t done it—that he hadn’t done something completely unforgivable—I knew what I would find.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I slid to a stop outside the door to the slave quarters, my still-shackled hands finding their way to the door. Sure enough the door was wide open. Every step into the room coincided with a surge in the dread I felt towards what I would see.
My eyes opened, and I screamed.
~ Shantae: 1,502 Years Ago ~
I sat in the corner of the slave baths, stripped bare of my clothes. Before me was a washbasin full of blood-stained water. Equally stained in blood were my hands and the clothes clutched in them. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the blood out of them. If anything, my efforts only seem to be dyeing the cloth the color of blood.
“Why won’t it wash out?” I whimpered, subconsciously clawing at them. “Why won’t the blood come out?”
None of the crystal pony slaves dared come close to me. It wasn’t just the blood, or the fact that I always got so snappish when it came to being naked. Word of mouth spread quickly among the two hundred some servants living in the castle. So when the bipedal freak Sombra kept as entertainment murdered one of the slave drivers, of course the ponies were going to be spooked.
If this had been my old life, I’d like to think that I’d have been fine with it. Making the hard choices at the office made it easy to ignore the cold shoulder I often got, but since I landed here in a body that didn’t belong to me, there was little social interaction I could draw on. There was nobody I could talk to about the change I’d undergone, or the continual assault of unfamiliar hormones. The only time I was ever allowed to speak was when answering or apologizing to the king and his slave drivers. After two years of it, I just wanted to cry most days.
... and I’d just taken a sapient life in cold blood. This wasn’t a fish or chicken for dinner, or even the act of mercy for an injured animal to spare it the pain of an agonizing death; I just kept slashing at him with my hair until he was nothing but bloody chunks. There wasn’t really anything I could say to rationalize it. He wasn’t whipping anyone, and he hadn’t been giving one of the many foals a violent dressing down. The poor sod wasn’t even doing anything; only by merit of being under Sombra’s employ and willingly working the slaves had he earned his death.
The thing that made it worse wasn’t that, when brought before Sombra, he wasn’t at all angry with me; he was fucking amused! That the sick bastard had the remains dragged into his throne room just so he could ask me himself if I had done it wasn’t what made it harder to swallow, either. No, he laughed as I stood there, gore still dripping from my hair, and sent me on my way.
God only knew what he had planned; the mere thought of it made me even more nauseous and I wanted nothing to do with it at all.
There came a gentle touch at my elbow, to which I let out a totally manly shriek. “Miss?” I looked down at my side, and was surprised to see a small blue filly. The way she was looking up to me reminded me a lot of my youngest daughter, and I couldn’t help but flinch away. “Are you okay?”
How did one even answer that question? Here was a child that clearly had enough empathy to look past the difference in species and the fact that I was still covered in blood to see see that I was in pain, to offer comfort, and I was at a loss for what to say. A capricious child like this would see right through an “I’m fine,” like it was freshly polished glass.
I shook my head. “I did a really bad thing,” I said, my voice shaking with each syllable. I let my clothes slip into the washtub, and hugged my knees close to my ample chest. “I-I hurt someone really bad and I don’t know what’s going to happen now. To any of us.”
“He was a bad pony,” the little filly said with a tone of finality that chilled me to the bone. “You isn’t. You hurt him ‘cause he was a bad pony who hurts us, right?” I nodded once, unable or unwilling to find the words. “When they was still alive, my mommy and daddy said a pony like you was a guardian... Not like those bad ponies who work for the king. You protect ponies ‘cause it’s the right thing to do.”
It was hard, but hearing the orphan’s words made it easier to breathe, like I wasn’t about to throw up. In a way, she was correct. Whether or not the stallion I killed had done anything when I lashed out at him was irrelevant. He was a slaver and had, on multiple occasions, dished out beatings and whippings on the poor souls I shared this bath with. If he hadn’t yet beaten, whipped, or worked a pony to death, he would have eventually.
By taking out that scum, had I not protected these ponies? Sure, Shantae probably wouldn’t have killed him, but she would have chosen to protect these ponies because it was the right thing to do; even when she’d been fired, she still protected Scuttle Town! I couldn’t protect the slaves that worked the mines, but perhaps I could be the Guardian Genie for this lot, at least for a time.
With a weak smile, I looked down at the filly once more. “What is your name, little one?”
“I’m Sapphire Brie!” she said, her own face brightening upon seeing my smile. “What’s yours?”
“I’m Shantae,” I said, placing a hand atop her head, giving her velvety little ears a rub. “I promise that I will never let the king’s goons hurt you or any of these ponies ever again. I give you my word as a Guardian Genie.”
~ Shantae: Present Day ~
“How long?” I asked, sinking to my knees. Both ponies had come running shortly after my scream, and I knew without ever turning my head that both were staring aghast at the horror that lie beyond the doorway. How couldn’t they? “How long have I been sealed away, beyond the passage of time?”
“Fifteen hundred years,” Cadance croaked. I could hear her voice cracking, and if she was anywhere near a decent pony as I believed she probably was, she was probably in tears. “Fifteen hundred years ago, King Sombra stole away the Crystal Empire. What... what happened here?”
I rose to my feet, shaking in barely suppressed anger. Stepping forward, picking my way through the mummified corpses of the ponies I’d sworn myself to protect—ponies who’d come to trust me to keep Sombra’s men civil, my friends—I pirouetted to face them both. Focusing on the two of them was all I could do to keep myself from searching for Sapphire in this mass grave, never mind thinking about my family. “He sacrificed all of their life energy, the life energy of nearly two hundred fifty ponies, to put the city and the rest of his slaves out of Celestia’s reach.
“You might think me a monster, some heartless killing machine loyal to the bastard who’d call himself king, but make ye no mistake. These were my friends,” I shouted, gesturing at the corpses at my feet. “Anything I did, it was to protect these ponies... to make sure this would never happen to them.
“I didn’t have the strength to break his hold on my body and mind until he set me against Celestia and Luna.” Tears began to stream down my cheeks as I stared at the gaping princess and her companion—guard, whatever. “If only they hadn’t been so quick to seal me away... I might have been able to save them...”
I shut my eyes and walked back through the field of lost souls, joining them back at the sole entrance to the mass grave. “Somewhere in there lies a little filly, Sapphire Brie,” I spat, digging my nails into my scarred palms hard enough to bleed. “Her blood is on the Sisters’ hands as much as Sombra’s.” I held out my wrists and growled, “I hold no quarrel with you, would-be Liberator, but I highly advise you to set me free so that I can hunt down and kill the son of a bitch that would use ponies’ very souls as currency to ensure his escape.”
Shining Armor stepped forward to block my way, his eyes narrowed. “You couldn’t stand up to him before.” It wasn’t a mockery or even an insult, just a mere statement of cold hard fact. “Why would you fare any better now?”
I looked him right back in the eye and gave him a cold smile. “Because you don’t give a soldier a weapon that can harm a god until you are certain he’s not about to turn that weapon on you.”
Black hellfire wreathed my hands, and the iron shackles bubbled away into nothing. It hurt like fuck, and I was definitely going to need more of that healing balm when this was over with, but I didn’t care. The flames of hell weren’t anywhere near as bad as what I was going through right now. Everyone I ever loved or cared about, here or on Earth, was now dead. Even as I wrapped my hands around the crystal collar, I barely noticed. There was one thing on my mind and one thing only.
I was going to make that motherfucker pay.
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Good, good. A new twist on the old take, with an interesting obscure character.
Although you might want to proofread the first chapter.
6103336 Yeah, I personally wasn't sure how many stories had the Displaced having been enslaved before they came into much of their power, and it seemed like an interesting direction to go.
6103338 I thought I'd gone over it well enough last night, but if you point me to the issues, I'll see to it that they're rectified.
Before:
After:
See the difference?
6103361 The only particular typo/issue I'm seeing is the missing 'the' in the first sentence. The rest comes down to stylistic choice [past perfect vs. simple past, for vs. as], and a choice in extra-embellishments. I'll admit the nightmare comparison added on to 'The shadow of the old king' is fitting, but the young and old alike feels unnecessary given the way it was addressed in the paragraph to follow.
6103411 Fair enough.
Oh, time for a smack down!
Pecila: KICK HIS ASS!
6103411 heres a song of this game
Shantae, yes! THANK YOU for doing a Displaced fic with her! Seriously, my favorite video game character of ever. Many, many thanks friend!
6103599 Shantae is best half-genie waifu, am I right?
6103621 She is ONLY waifu!
that's was good can I have another or another words or please thank you for the excellent read it was quite amusing
6103803 I should have another chapter out this evening or tomorrow morning, if things hold up.
This
is
AWESOME!!
6103525 I prefer the Lilac Fields theme from Risky's Revenge. If I'm to be honest, there is a song that I have in ming for this overall story arc: Aero Chord's Break Them.
I can actually imagine Shante playing this as she fights Sombra:
6103525
Mt first reaction was, 'Oh no, even Seven Fates got drawn into this Displaced nonsense?' Then my reaction was, "What even is that Genie from?" But now I'm just thinking, 'Sweet music!'
6103856 You should probably check the games out. They're a pretty decent metroidvania sort, and Shantae: Risky's Revenge is currently like CAD$2.74 on Steam right now.
......No, no no no no no...
Not you, please tell me you didn't jump on that damn band wagon too...
~Skeeter The Lurker
You have a favorite and upvote, for now. Giving you the benefit of the doubt as long as we don't have much cross-displaced contamination.
6103986 Don't worry. I don't plan on having too many crossovers in this one.
6104283
Excellent so far!
Keep it up Seven Fates, I hope to see you do well with your story. =3
Ok. You got me with this. I'm going to follow this story now.
However, I think this song is perfect for what Shante is feeling.
Keep er go 'n!!! I think I'm watching to much Vanoss... eh whatever I like they it so far and can't wait for the next chapter.
6104876 Yeah. One thing I've come to realize after my little hiatus from writing is to never self-edit while tired. Especially when one ends up changing a sentence.
Bad Seven. Bandwagons are bad, mkay?
6103340 im usually not attracted to displaced fics, they seem too similar to each other with almost the same plot line, but this has piqued my interest
Hm....
out
them
6105049 Please excuse me while I proceed to bang my head on my desk in shame.
6105011 Yeah, most of them start with the being involved being a statue or just popping up in the present. Using Sombra as an excuse is something I haven't seen done yet. I'm rather curious about the initial years of this story now after some of the hints that were left out in the open.
6105080
Thanks for replying, I forgot to like and fave this earlier.
I usually hate displaced stories, but this is Seven Fates.
....ohh..... ....
Displaced...
Not an actual crossover.
pbs.twimg.com/media/CHVQllJVAAAkTdE.jpg
All right, this is pretty cool. So long as you don't include all those stupid crossovers with other displaced stories that every author of this theme does, then I will continue to wait
impatiently for each new chapter. Keep up the good work my friend.I wonder how Shantae would react to my Jack.
Also, somewhat fitting song:
6106022 I have no idea if this will even fit in with the other stories.
I'm more interested in the character than the Displace universe. If it has crossover with other stories, I don't care much about it. As long as it is well written, I will read the story.
6105991 Unfortunately, can't submit without the tag.
6105382 No problem.
Mhhhh, excellent....
pinkie.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw5203-discord_exelent.jpg
A HiE story that has a genie in Equestria? This could actually be interest—
Oh, no, wait. False alarm. Displaced.
Let there be violence. Copious amounts of violence. Insane quantities of violence! Violence to shake the skies and be remembered in myth and legend until the sun burns out and all the stars turn to ash!
Good story so far, interesting character choice, and I look forward to seeing more soon.
Hype!
encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTkB8upMISkOQz2vAVVSqCPwc7UO1fmRPpelblj1-FbTdabvWUhaw
The battle scene to come will probably fit with this sound track.
You had me at Shantae, then you lost me at displaced. I'll give it a try but it wont be the same since its not really her.
6106468 Had me at Shantae and sold me at Displaced.
*Evil smile.*
This is going to be a fun read.
Displaced stories suck so badly. It's really a shame, since some of them could have been good if it was the actual character instead of a way to make bad self-inserts.