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Introduction: So You've Found Yourself In The Body Of An Evil Overlord2,809 words
Lesson One: The Beginning Is The Most Dangerous Time5,523 words

Introduction: So You've Found Yourself In The Body Of An Evil Overlord

It happens more often than you'd think, strangely enough.

Suddenly finding yourself in the body of an evil overlord, I mean. I know what you're probably thinking. It's probably something like 'How in the world could that be physically possible?' Well, let me give you an honest answer: It's magic. That's all. What, you think there's some long, complex list of rules to magic? That there's some concrete set of laws that it has to follow? Nope. Magic is, by its very definition, something that contradicts the rules of reality. While there are some basic guidelines, such as 'Don't try to swallow an energy field larger than your head in one sitting', magic doesn't follow anybody's rules. That's probably why a lot of the most powerful wizards are insane in one way or another: If you are completely lacking in common sense, then you have no preconceptions, and as such will be more than willing to try things that common sense would normally tell you are impossible.

Anyway, if I tell you that something is magic, you'll have to accept that as an explanation, as I honestly and sincerely have no other means by which to explain that shit.

So, given that magic does whatever the fuckall it wants in any given situation, it's no surprise that crazy shit like getting stuck in the body of a villain happens fairly often. Really, it should be happening every second of every day. While not that common, thankfully, you've no doubt wound up, or are expecting to wind up in the near future, in a situation where you are going to be imitating an evil overlord for the foreseeable future. And I don't mean like an ordinary evil dictator: I mean like Sauron, Voldemort, Brona The Warlock Lord, guys like that. Guys with magic powers up the ass, and have an evil army of less powerful but similarly minded minions. Guys who will flay and sautee you if they find out that you've taken their master's place.

Now, odds are, you're just an ordinary dude, and you're not evil enough to pass as whoever or whatever you've found yourself as. If you actually are, then go ahead and put this guide down: There's nothing here that I can teach you that you don't already know. The purpose of this guide is to help those who are not suited for this kind of situation, yet find themselves in an evil overlord's body, as I did myself, and instruct them on how to survive.

Yeah, that's right, I found myself in the shoes of an evil overlord. In fact, it was the cloven hooves of a particularly nasty fellow named Grogar. Worse, though, was the fact that the realm I wound up in was actually already conquered by a villainous lass by the name of Nightmare Moon. And no, she wasn't interested in sharing. So, not only was I stuck in this situation, I also had to deal with another evil overlord who wanted my head on a silver platter... with my nuts on the side for garnish.

Now, if I just gave you a bunch of rules to follow, you'd probably forget about them inside of a week, and then you'd be be in a lot of trouble when any of the situations I encountered happen to you. So, instead, I'll relate to you all the tale of my sudden and unexpected arrival, and how I managed to deal with this unbelievable situation. It'll make you laugh, and maybe even cry, but it will help to engrave these lessons into your mind so that you'll remember them in case you end up where I've been.

Before I begin the tale proper, I'll need to give you a bit of background.

Now, many of you know about the realm of Equestria if you're reading this: I haven't yet worked out a way of transporting this book outside of the Equestrian chain of alternate universes, after all. It may be that you're on some distant, unrelated world and are thumbing through an old copy of the book in the distant future where that's been worked out, though, so I'll try to keep this prologue brief, but entertaining.

Once upon a time, there was a magical land filled with magical ponies. The name of this land was Equestria. Sadly, while this should have been a realm filled with sunshine, rainbows, and baby bunny rabbit kisses, it seemed that the fates were intent on taking a gigantic deuce on the lives of everyone who lived there. The residents were at the mercy of a metric fuckton of monsters that thought that ponies were both delicious and nutritious, or at least made good slaves. Thus, life in Equestria sucked more than that Mega-Maid spaceship from Spaceballs.

Now, occasionally, great heroes would appear and would be able to layeth the smacketh down upon the foul beasts ravaging the land. Gusty the Great, Starswirl the Bearded (Lots of guys with 'The' as a middle name, for some reason), and various others would come along, and for a little while, things would be great. But heroes usually have a very short shelf-life: They're mortal, like the rest of us. So, let's do some quick math.

Now, let's say a hero reaches the point where he can combat evil at the age of fifteen. Fantastic. Now, he's able to successfully fight evil until he's sixty-five. Even better! That's fifty years. After he's sixty-five, though, he no longer has the ability to fight, or he gets killed, or whatever. The problem is, a hero like this guy only comes along once every couple of centuries. This means that, regrettably, for the fifty years of prosperity brought about because of the hero, there will be one hundred fifty years of suck because of the monsters coming back, once they are sure that the evil-vanquishing hero is gone. And the monsters will be extra hungry, extra mad, and extra evil specifically because, hey, guess what? They had to hide for fifty years to keep away from that hero. A hero capable of defeating powerful immortal monsters is rare, so for the majority of such creatures, it was more of an inconvenience than anything else. But monsters hate being inconvenienced.

The main problem was, heroes were mortal, monsters were not. Monsters could just lay low and wait out the occasional hero, let him or her grow old and die, and then it would be business as usual. Typically, it was when the hero was unknown that monsters got vanquished left and right. Like with Grogar and Gusty the Great: Before sealing Grogar away, Gusty the Great was just Gusty. It took defeating Grogar to make Gusty great. If Grogar had known he was facing a hero, he'd have headed for the hills like everyone else.

Anyway, Equestrians weren't dumb: They could see the pattern just as well as the monsters could, and decided that it sucked. But what could they do? This wasn't Earth, where all you really need to make a hero is training, hard work, and exercise. No, this was Equestria, where every pony had their destiny branded on them when they turned five, and no matter how hard they tried, they couldn't change it. Destiny said that a hero could only come along once every couple of centuries, so there was no way of helping it. So, if destiny was going to be a fucking bitch, and fail to read the current situation, Equestria would have to do something to make sure that when they had a hero again, they didn't die and leave Equestria unprotected ever again.

Now, the details of what happened next are... lacking, to say the least. It has something to do with Harmony, some magical bullshit force that ponies have at their disposal that arbitrarily hands out immortality and superpowers to the 'deserving', using criteria that no one understands (Seriously, I've spent a lot of time researching 'Harmony', and that statement is the culmination of all my hard work). Somehow, Equestria managed to transform two ponies with the potential for heroes into 'alicorns', ponies with both the power of magic and the power of flight, as well as the power of the sun and moon, with a moderate form of immortality. They could die if they were killed, naturally, but they'd usually recover from any injury that didn't kill them outright. Thus, Equestria now had champions who could fight off the monsters, and keep them away: Alicorns never aged, never got sick, so they could effectively fight forever.

And for a while, life was fan-fucking-tabulous in Equestria. All of the current roaming monsters were sealed away in Tartaraus, a magical Super-Max prison that was almost impossible to escape from. The two alicorns ruled wisely and well. But then, a problem appeared...

It started simply enough: A batch of monsters appeared, all within a very short span of time: Lord Tirek, King Sombra (A pony, but he was more of a monster than any pony ever born), Discord, etc. The two alicorns, Celestia and her younger sister, Luna, dealt with these problems as best they could, but these monsters were stronger than normal. After many difficult battles, they prevailed. However, Celestia tended to get most of the praise for their respective accomplishments. This upset her younger sister a great deal, and Luna began to envy her sister. Sadly, unlike Jan in the Brady Bunch, she didn't go to her parents and complain about 'Marcia, Marcia, Marcia'. Instead, she did what many teenage girls do when they feel that the world sucks and want to get attention: She dyed her hair black, radically changed the way she dressed, and changed her name to something uber-edgy, in this case, 'Nightmare Moon'. Then, she decided to try and kill her sister. Celestia loved her sister dearly, and tried to talk her down. However, when it became clear that Nightmare Moon was shooting to kill, the sun princess had no choice but to use Equestria's Fuck You/I Win Button, the Elements of Harmony, and sealed Nightmare Moon inside of the moon for one thousand years.

In the history many of you know, when Nightmare Moon emerged a thousand years later, she was purified by the Elements of Harmony, and returned to being Luna once more. But this story is not about the history you know...

Now, as most anyone knows about Equestria, there's multiple timelines out there, due to a mare named Starlight Glimmer deciding that monkeying with the timeline was the best way to get revenge on Twilight Sparkle. Now, while the original timeline was restored to its proper place, those alternate timelines persisted. That meant that there were timelines where all the great threats that Equestria had faced were victorious, or nearly so, and no one could do anything about them. Twilight Sparkle, not knowing any better, had gone on with her life, along with her new friend Starlight Glimmer, in the Prime Timeline, or to use a phrase coined by the guy who advised me to write this guide, PrimeTime. Meanwhile, everyone trapped in those alternate timelines was most assuredly fucked.

Multiverse theory is a bitch. Time does not, cannot, move just in a straight line: In order for time travel to exist at all, all alternate timelines must persist, or else you would paradox out of existence the second you went back into the past. What we perceive as the forward flow of events is merely one of countless currents, carrying us all along in the vast ocean of time.

In the universe that this story takes place in, the Sonic Rainboom never happened, Twilight Sparkle and friends never met, and the Elements of Harmony were never gathered. Thus, when Nightmare Moon came back to Equestria, Celestia was not able to stop her. The sun princess was sealed inside of the moon, and the kingdom was quickly dominated by the deranged moon goddess.

Nightmare Moon first faced an invasion of changelings: These guys saw what was going down and realized that a world without sun was a world without life, and a world without life was a world without love. And a world without love means a world that will quickly be without changelings. Thus, they fought, and Nightmare Moon fought back. The mad moon goddess slew their queen, and then raided the hive. While the hive was empty, she found the Queen's Throne, and the anti-magic effect it had. More the the point, she discovered after it was broken, the shards retained the properties of the larger throne, but with a much smaller radius. Thus, it was the perfect weapon to use against foes who would normally be much more powerful than herself... like Lord Tirek or Discord.

Discord was slain by a flurry of anti-magic arrows. He failed to recognize them for what they were until they failed to to turn into pigeons at the snap of a finger. Sadly, by the time he realized his magic wouldn't work against them, he was doing a very unpleasant impersonation of a pincushion. Lord Tirek died from an anti-magic ballista bolt to the chest. King Sombra, well, he just surrendered: He didn't want any of that shit to come his way. He may have had ways of cheating death, but an anti-magic dagger to the heart would mean he couldn't use any of them until it was removed.

Nightmare Moon disposed of every potential threat to her reign, and established a new palace in the Everfree Forest. Life was good... for her. At least for a few years...

Then, something unusual happened: An alicorn from an alternate timeline appeared. She wasn't there long, but Twilight's sudden appearance revealed that time travel was possible, and that the key resided in a table sitting in the middle of the Everfree Forest. Nightmare Moon spent weeks studying the table...

And discovered nothing. Even before she became Nightmare Moon, magical research was not Luna's strong suit. She needed an expert. And she knew where to find one.

The thoroughly wicked and unlikable pony by the name of King Sombra. She'd kept him alive, just in case he'd be useful later. He was only a pony, after all. A powerful one, to be sure, but compared to Nightmare Moon, being the world's most powerful unicorn was like being the world's most powerful chipmunk. Thus, he was set free, and set to work on the task before him: Unlock the secrets of time travel. Like Nightmare Moon, Sombra was evil, insane, and had a hard-on for absolute power. When Nightmare Moon offered him the chance to research time travel, he jumped at the opportunity: After all, if Nightmare Moon's timeline still existed after Twilight's dramatic departure, then Sombra could go back in time and create his own variant timeline, one where he ruled uncontested, and had done so for over a thousand years, without mucking up Nightmare Moon's timeline. Win-win.

However, much like Nightmare Moon, he couldn't get it to work. Go figure. The table wasn't the key, it was the lock... and they had no idea what kind of spell was needed to unlock it. It would take years, or even decades, to figure out an answer to this riddle.

However, their focus on getting time travel to function required them to work together on a project, one that would ultimately alter the fate of Equestria...

They couldn't work on time travel magic AND rule over the kingdom at the same time. A tyranny requires constant supervision, or else the natives get restless. Thus, they created something that would manage the kingdom in their stead: The Tantabus, a modified version of the creature powerful enough to exist in the real world. It would make sure that the kingdom was utterly and totally subjugated in Nightmare Moon's absence, so that no one could interfere with the research of the tyrant king and the mad moon deity.

However, the Tantabus viewed Nightmare Moon as its mother, and King Sombra as its father. And much like a child, the Tantabus wanted the attention and approval of her parents. However, how could she get it? Just ruling the country properly wasn't working: They didn't even bother responding to her weekly progress reports, in spite of the fact that the kingdom was running at peak efficiency. Something drastic was needed to get them to notice her. The Tantabus needed a serious crisis to appear, and then she had to defeat it. Then, she was sure, her parents would love her.

She figured out the perfect way to manufacture a crisis, one big enough to get the attention of both of her parents. And that way involved finding the treacherous Grogar, and the lost kingdom of Tambelon... and delivering his head to her parents on a silver platter.

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QuartzScale

QuartzScale #1 · Jun 12th, 2017 · 14 · ·

Ok Sofa King. You had me with the Sombra story and I expect that to continue but I'll keep track of this one as well.

Everglue Horace

Everglue Horace #2 · Jun 12th, 2017 · · ·

How many evil overlords are there in Equestria? the only episodes I've watched more than once are abridged parodies and a handful of Merriweather Williams episodes. Beyond that my knowledge is limited to the serendipity web comic.

Sofa King Zill-E

Sofa King Zill-E #3 · Jun 12th, 2017 · 3 · ·

8228172
In G4, there's Nightmare Moon, at least in the alternate timeline that Twilight visited, as well as King Sombra. Queen Chrysalis counts, whether it is ruling the changelings or the alternate timeline where she succeeded. In G1, both Lord Tirek and Grogar were also evil overlords. Starlight Glimmer was kind of an evil overlord in the making, although she only ruled over the one town.

Von Voctavia

Von Voctavia #4 · Jun 12th, 2017 · 1 · ·

Surprisingly strong opening!

I wonder if Nightmare Moon knows of Sombra's plan to rule an alt-timeline? Hell he probably straight up told her. "You want me to research time travel magic? The price is my very own timeline where I rule everything. Deal? Okay sweet!"

Sofa King Zill-E

Sofa King Zill-E #5 · Jun 12th, 2017 · 4 · ·

8228190
That's more or less the canon.

Everglue Horace

Everglue Horace #6 · Jun 12th, 2017 · 1 · 7 ·

This wasn't Earth, where all you really need to make a hero is training, hard work, and exercise.

Yes, but humans are already something akin to monsters, forged in the image of a self styled or fatalist god that is similarly capricious or arbitrary, the hero's are often mistaken for Dirty Harry, think they're Jesus Christ, and every single one has an easily diagnosable personality or development disorder by the time their twelve years old. Heck even among human doctors there is a greater likelihood that their idea of heroism is angel of mercy killing... I blame socialist communists who claim all capitalists are opportunists.

I also understand that they've decided who is going to run for president or political office by the time a child is eight years old... And, I'm pretty sure the journalists are manufactured as well.

VikingOtaku6