• Published 4th Jun 2020
  • 1,695 Views, 52 Comments

It Takes A Princess - Casketbase77



Creativa's struggle against Order's tyranny isn't going well. Another humiliating defeat has her hurled her across time and space... and into the lap of a Moon Princess who was just starting to get bored of retirement.

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To Break Up A Fight

Tap, scritch, thump, clop.

Tap, scritch, thump, clop.

The sound of Creativa’s mismatched footsteps echoed through the cave. Loud enough to cover her apprehensive breathing, but too quiet to drown her thoughts.

Per usual, Creativa had no idea where this most recent banishment had sent her. She'd known it was dangerous to fire up her magic to boost her troupe’s morale, but they’d all been hiding and sacred in the mountains for so long. Certainly an impromptu rainbow-colored campfire could safely lighten their collective mood. No dice; Order detected it across the world and appeared in their midst immediately. An idle snap of his pale fingers erased the unnatural flame from existence and sent everypony scattering. Creativa counterattacked him of course, calling on every spell she had and igniting like a one-mare whirlwind of anti-matter and entropic hexcasting. Twiddle Spiral, her faithful student, was a practiced veteran at this point, deft enough to untraceably teleport everypony else to safety in mere seconds. This was fortunate, since ‘mere seconds’ was usually all the time Creativa could keep Order occupied. Like so many clashes before, Creativa watched him fend off her most intense attacks before growing annoyed and snapping again. This time she found herself spitting silt as she lay winded from her impact on this cave’s dirty floor.

Tap, scritch, thump, clop.

Creativa was too bruised from her landing to run. Worse, she was afraid to spellcast again. Wherever this place was that Order had dumped her off, it was utterly saturated with so much Harmony magic Creativa could feel it on her tongue. Even if she was able to pick out a precious Chaos-enabled leyline amid all this smothering normal mana, she couldn’t risk incurring Order’s wrath again. Not so soon. He'd been able to track her magic signature all the way in the barren Prancing Peaks, so in here he'd be on her in an instant. The awful truth was that Order was stronger than Creativa. Much stronger. She had her bag of eclectic tricks, but even when they were supercharged by the desperate belief of the hunted ponies she protected, nothing compared to Order’s authority over the Sun, the seas, and even the ground itself.

Creativa’s informal rebellion was hanging by a thread. She reckoned the only reason Order hadn’t atomized her loyalists already was because he was too anal to dispose of reclaimable horsepower. Creativa had swayed them to her cause with extreme difficulty, and Order was winning large chunks of the defectors back by simply humiliating her whenever she conjured anything chaotic. The two of them had been feuding for years, and in that time Creativa could count on one pseudo-claw the number of sentences Order had bothered speaking to her. Quantity didn't matter though; each dismissive comment cut deep. Certainly more deep than any of her own wild extravagant efforts to weaken and dethrone him anyway.

“Eventually, they will all see the weary mortal mare under all that patchwork regalia.”

“Spread your fingerpaint for your fans so my tides may wash your work away in front of them.”

“Your colors are clashing less and less nowadays.”

Creativa loosed a double harmonic whinny of sad frustration and bucked the cave wall impotently. There was sunlight up ahead. An exit to open ground. But realistically, what was waiting for her out there? Endless fields of uniform grass that grew in perfect unison. Perpetually temperate weather that resisted all her attempts to add either storm or shine. And (most painful of all) pockets of browbeaten, passionless ponies. Creativa had seen so many in her time, mulling around the sterile boxy houses provided to them by their monster king. This world belonged to Order. A single alicorn, even an expert Chaos mage like Creativa, couldn’t change that. Faust knew she’d been trying all her life.

And yet, despite the differing aches in both her heart and legs, the motley leader of the naysayers continued limping toward the cave exit. She trusted Twiddle Spiral to keep everypony together until she found them again. Besides, giving up wouldn’t be what Loopa would’ve wanted.

In the dark of the cave, Creativa could almost imagine Loopa still with her. She would yipp at Creativa’s heels like she always did whenever she got excited, demanding Creativa drop the “sad clown” act. Then she'd bellow out loud how Order had power over their world, not their attitudes. Creativa closed her eyes and shook her tri-horned head, trying to clear the doubt away. Loopa was long gone, but it’d be a snow day in the Kalahorsey Desert before Creativa disrespected her little sister’s memory by losing hope.

Hmm… a blizzard in the Kalahorsey might actually be a good idea. A strong, symbolic sign that Order’s grip on that region wasn't ironclad. Creativa made a mental note to try conjuring one of those when she and her followers were inevitably forced to retreat to that area of the world. The anticipation was enough to managed a melancholy smile.

“I’ll make him pay for what he did to you, Loopa. I promise. No matter how many times I get knocked dow-”

Harmony had a knack for answering Creativa whenever she tempted fate. This time it surprised her with a sudden drop off that sent the hapless harlequin skidding down a sand-coated downward slope towards the exit. Creativa reflexively flared her mismatched wings to catch some drag. Enough to avoid toppling, but not enough to avoid splashing down into the ocean after plummeting out of the tide-carved cave’s elevated opening.

Creativa thrashed disgracefully in the water, blinded by salt and daylight as she kicked towards the surface. The propulsion from her webbed hind overtook her hooved one, skewing her trajectory and forcing her to paddle wildly until her forelimbs helped course correct. Then she broke the surface for a gasp air before yet another wave crashed over her. A less panicked, less drowning Creativa would’ve been overjoyed to find a chilly body of water producing tides and waves. After all, most of the oceans under Order’s control stayed tepid and motionless at all times. Right now that sort of abstract moralizing was muted by a hysteric drive for survival. She floundered and licked like a helpess dissenter in Order's unforgiving grip until finally, laboriously, her heaving belly scraped the beach shore.

Her sinuses burned from snorting in seawater. Creativa chuffed weakly and lowered her eyes so the sun wasn't shining into them. Then she choked back a bray of alarm. Through the black curtain of her dripping mane, the refugee Alicorn of Chaos saw her new beach was already occupied.

Kneeling on a picnic blanket and between two lawn chairs was a tall white pony with swan wings. She had a massive sun hat and expesie-looking Bray Ban sunglasses, past both of which she stared dumbfounded at the stranger washed up on shore. The swan pony looked about the same age as Creativa. Same height and weight too. In fact, as the doppelganger levitated her sunhat off and held it up to give Creativa some shade, it revealed two more details about itself that made bile rise in Creativa’s parched throat: First was that it was indeed an alicorn. The second was that her cascading mane and tail were perfect matches for Order’s. Before Creativa was nightmarish distortion of herself, and it even spoke in a copy of her own voice: “My word, what’s your circumstance?”

Full of fury, Creativa sprang to her feet and began blasting wildly.

“Stop it!” she roared as her horns and antler ricocheted bolts in every direction. “Stop it, Order! Stop taunting me!”

It was too much. He had taken her sister away. He had humiliated her over and over in front of a dwindling troupe of fellow freedom fighters. And he'd dumped her here, castaway on an unknown beach so thick with Harmony magic it was hard to breathe. All to be finished off by this terrible construct of herself modeled in his own image. Creativa had been pushed too far. She was reduced to a mad dog. A flailing spastic creature with nothing left but bluster.

Order’s assassin was stumbling backwards, so Creativa frantically fired everything she had at it. The doppelganger tanked Creativa’s cocktail of unfocused beams, barely being knocked to its knees. It was certainly strong, but Creativa was used to being outmatched. She had been prey all her life, and everypony knew how that old saying went about cornered rats.

Espying magic, Creativa tackled her enemy and pinned it to the sand. Doing so caused its Bray Ban sunglasses to dislodge. Even through the doppelganger’s painful squinting, Creativa could see purple irises, same as Order’s. Her inner fire wavered for a moment, buffeted by a breeze of numbing realization that after a lifetime of struggle, she’d finally gotten the upper hoof. For once, she was the one holding dominion over a stunned opponent. And in her split second of dissociative doubt, an indignantly thrown juice box soared at Creativa from the left to thwap her sensitive nose.

“What in Tartarus have I come back to? Move off my sister, you gaudy oaf!”

Loopa’s voice.

Creativa’s courage vanished as quickly as it'd flared up. She barely managed a moan in defeat, sliding limply off her doppelganger to curl up pitifully in the wet sand. Loopa’s doppelganger approached, reduced to a blurry smear through the tears beginning to flow thick and fast. Creativa was finished. She couldn’t duel an echo of her sister. Her weak heart wouldn’t let her. This was going to be where her crusade ended: Not in a pitched battle with Order himself, but struck down by the specter of the pony whose memory she’d fought so hard for. Creativa didn’t even care enough to look up as she waited for the end.

“Did she harm you?”

“I don’t think she even can. She looks the part of Discord, but seems to spellcast on the exact same biorhythm as me.”

“What in Tartarus is she?”

“Afraid. Which is all we should care about right now.”

Creativa didn’t understand. Order never wasted time when dealing with annoyances. Why weren’t his proxies ending her already? She didn’t understand why her clone was draping the repurposed picnic blanket over her. She didn’t understand why Loopa’s clone was pressing a dented but mercifully cool juice box to her forehead.

She just didn’t understand.