I managed to get out of the hospital not much later. The melted ice cream in my mane was sticky, and I went over to the library to have a shower. Spike was there, trying to take care of all the animals the departing ponies had left him while they went to the Crystal Empire.

After cleaning up, I went back out to the main room of the library. Spike had disappeared, taking the animals with him. Rexy didn’t seem to be causing too many problems.

There was an earth pony pretending to look at the books. I say pretending, because the moment I stepped into the room she lost all interest and shot me with a high-powered glare. “There you are.”

Her mane was blonde streaked with magenta, and there was a typewriter on her hip. I had never seen her before, but I recognized the voice.

I jumped backwards. “How did you get here?!”

“It’s not important. What you need to do is help me restore Equestria to the way it was. No more crazy things. No more excessive violence.”

“Why? Why do you care about these ponies? Furthermore, how did you know I was here? Why do you want to associate with me after we broke up? And actually, I think the question you didn’t answer about how you got here is pretty damn important.”

She continued to advance, cranking up the wattage on her glare even further. This is why we had broken up. She intimidated the heck out of me. Her look was different than Fluttershy’s Stare. It was more like a directed-energy weapon, and as the Black Twins had inadvertently revealed, it worked on them too.

I swallowed hard. “Okay… give me a moment. I only just got out of the hospital. I’m sure you’ve seen how that happened.”

“That’s part of the reason why I’m here,” she said flatly. “This isn’t about just you.”

My ears perked up. “Are you here to help me with the Black Twins?”

“Yes.”

I got up, managing to hold myself back from doing a little jig. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go!”

She didn’t go. In fact, she hadn’t thought my question was rhetorical at all. “We’re waiting on a few others.”

I sat back down. “Who?”

“Trust me, you know them.”

The door opened. A tan pegasus with a straight-cut brown mane entered. Her cutie mark was a fiery wheel. There were two ponies with her, both wearing long cloaks. I could see that they had horns.

I had been surprised by one ex-girfriend today, and got a vague sinking feeling that maybe I was looking at more.

“You’ve probably seen Wildfire around,” noted Types, indicating the pegasus. I had decided to mentally call her Types because her real name almost gave me shivers to say.

“Did I date you?” I asked the other mare. “I’ve seen you around before.”

“No, actually,” said Wildfire. “I’m just the monitor and have been watching how things were going. The situation has gotten desperate, even more so than it appears. I had to call the others in for some direct intervention.”

I turned to the two still under cloaks. “And you are…?”

The shorter one pulled her hood back. “You know who I am.”

I blinked in confusion, seeing a face and hearing a voice I knew. “Twilight?”

She shook her head. “No, this is just the form I was randomly assigned when we arrived here. You can be très stupide sometimes.”

“Wha…French...”

She waited patiently for me to make the connection. I shook my head. “But…I didn’t even know you could speak English! How could you deceive me for so long? I thought girls from Quebec were supposed to be nice!”

“Because me speaking in English sounds almost exactly like Twilight Sparkle, so I didn’t want to cause any confusion. And you got to learn French, so there’s a bonus to you. Oh, and just because I’m able to speak French and Canadian doesn’t automatically mean I’m French-Canadian.”

I shook my head again. “Ta—”

She jammed a hoof in my mouth before I could finish saying her name. “We’re trying to fix everything that’s wrong in Equestria, and to do that we need to stay covert and un-human as possible. Don’t use real names.”

I spit out her hoof and nodded in reluctant agreement. I supposed that made sense. I turned to the last pony, who was the tallest in the room by a fair margin. “So, who are you?”

She pulled her hood down. Her coat was white beneath a mane colored a particular shade of red. That was what tipped me off. Only one woman could have had hair like that.

I giggled. All four of them glared at me. I managed to get myself under control. “Sorry. It’s a long story, but it involved a rocket launcher and a play on words with your name. Then I blew up a giant bug. It was pretty funny, trust me.”

They all stared at me and shook their heads. Wildfire said, “That’s lame.”

“Oh yeah? And I assume you know how to have a good time? You hang out with my exes!”

She got in my face. “On Earth, I drive racecars and I’m too cool to have ever dated you!”

I swept my hoof over the others. “You’re better than them?”

“Yeah! I mean, wait…”

I put on my best trollface. The others gave Wildfire a look.

“This is just what he does,” said Types. “You’re lucky you never dated him.”

“Can we get moving?” asked the mare-who-looked-like-Twilight. “We really need to get this problem solved as quickly as possible.”

“We need to go to the Crystal Empire,” said Panzerfaust. “It’s very important that we head off the great evil that is about to befall Equestria.”

“Villain of the week?” I said. “Let me handle it. I’ve killed plenty of bad guys during my time spent here.”

“This is who has been controlling the Black Twins, and formerly, Trixie,” said Fauxlight. “I believe you know of him—the Crystal King?”

I nodded cautiously. “Yeah, I’ve heard the name. So is he actually King Sombra or someone completely different?

“Let’s put it this way,” said Types. “King Sombra isn’t all he is.”

I thought that a sad look might have crossed her face as she said it. My mind ran wild with speculation. Did she know him from Earth? Did I? Were the two of them romantically involved? As her ex, how much did I care? Just what else was she hiding?

I cleared my throat. “Sounds interesting. Tell me more.”

“You really need to work on your transitions,” commented Panzer. “No audience watching at home would ever believe that total lack of sincerity or abrupt mood shift.”

“Shut up,” I mumbled. “At least I don’t draw cartoons.”

“That’s more for the benefit of society than anything you ever did,” she replied lightly, refusing to stoop to my level. I hate it when that tactic doesn’t work.

I sighed. “Fine. Let’s go to the Crystal Empire and get this sorted out.”

“We can talk on the way,” suggested Types. The five of us left the library.

“It’ll be too loud to talk, and I don’t have headset communicators for you all,” I said, turning towards where Monstrosity was parked. All of them immediately nixed the idea.

“We’re taking the train,” insisted Wildfire.

“What, a racecar driving pegasus like you is afraid of a little mechanical aviation?” I taunted. Unfortunately, she was a quick learner and refused to be baited again.

“It’s necessary for normality to be maintained as much as possible,” explained Types. “Plus, that flying machine would attract attention to our arrival in the Crystal Empire.”

I sighed and rolled my eyes. “Fine.”

We got train tickets and boarded. I thought I felt a t-rex hiding under my seat, but couldn’t be sure. I decided not to mention it because the visitors from Earth probably would not like to hear that.

There was an interesting thought. Had I spent enough time here to think that perhaps I was becoming a native and others from Earth were “visitors”? That was a horrible thought and I decided to think about other things. Namely, the four mares that were discussing the situation. I tried to butt into the conversation. “So do I get to know everything that is going on?”

“No,” they chorused.

“So let me monologue,” I said. “That usually helps get all the facts out on the table. First, while I’ve been here in Equestria, bad things have happened.”

“We had a plan,” interrupted Panzer. “You ruined the whole thing. We tried to get it back on track with subtle alterations to the world, but eventually it was decided that drastic measures needed to be taken.”

“I have no idea what those might be,” I said. I paused to think for a moment. “But I have a few guesses. Things like the appearance of really big bad guys like Nightmare Moon, Discord, the Changelings, and King Sombra. Equestria had supposedly experienced a thousand years of peace before I showed up. Then, we get like four apocalypse scenarios all at once. Five, if you count what the Black Twins have done.”

“Incorrect,” commented Frenchie Sparkle. “Some of those were planned. Your method of handling them was what went wrong. We knew we had to do something. Somepony you would never suspect was our agent.”

Several names came to mind. The trouble was, if it was one I would never suspect, I wouldn’t think of it. So I tried to think of ones that I wouldn’t think about. That went about as well as you might expect.

I threw up my hooves. “I give up. Tell me the answer.”

They didn’t.

“And what do you mean by ‘your agent’? Too afraid to come to Equestria and do dirty work yourself?”

“Hey, it’s not dirty work,” retorted Wildfire. “I volunteered to keep an eye on things here while maintaining a low profile so I wouldn’t mess things up like you did.”

“So…are you guys like the gods of this world or something?” I asked. I dreaded if the answer was yes, but that would certainly make for some awesome crazy ex-girlfriend stories.

“This is an alternate reality created for wholesome entertainment,” explained Panzer. “It’s a place to go to escape the real world, a place where you can dream and be happy with simple things.”

“All of us and others had a share in creating it,” said Types. “This was supposed to be a refuge from the real world. A place to get away from it all.”

“Well, I can sort of see how I might have screwed that up.”

“Oh really?” the purple Canadian nearly shouted. “Is is that obvious? You ruin everything!”

I ducked my head. “I’m sorry, I truly didn’t mean to. Do you think I would intentionally jump into your little universe and screw with things on purpose? You all know that I try to stay as far away from my exes as possible. And anyway, how could I have known about your little project or figured out how to get here?”

They were silent, possibly even slightly regretful for assuming that I was more of a dick than I really was. See, even my ex-girlfriends don’t think I’m the worst person out there.

I continued. “So, what is this place? How did I end up here, anyway? I thought the magical rock that caused all this was planted on me by someone from Equestria—that you created.”

“Equestria is more a state of mind than anything,” said Panzer. “If you believe hard enough, anything is possible. With several of us coordinating our efforts—”

“And witchcraft,” broke in Wildfire.

Panzer shot her a glare. “That isn't what it really is, and you know it. Back to what I was saying, clearly we have created a world that goes beyond simple imagineation.”

“So...this kind of is a dream?” I said. “Or more like a dream gone uncomfortably real? One with bad guys that can breach our world to slip me magic rocks?”

Types shifted uncomfortably. “That was a result of a failed experiment. A very failed measure that we took to try and stop you. In fact, it’s still causing problems.”

I remembered back to the crazy wedding when I’d realized some of what was going on. “Derpy traveled time and space, forced to do tasks for her Changeling overlords. She came to Earth and slipped the rock into my pocket at a bar so that I would wake up in Equestria. In fact, that makes it even less of my fault than before. The universe you created pulled me in without my consent.”

“The Changelings are only part of the puzzle,” said Types. “Believe me, I know.”

I wondered how to take her comment, but went on. “So what exactly are we dealing with here? It’s certainly not good when an artificial universe you created is able to make jumps back to our world.”

“We told you, the Crystal King is behind it,” put in Panzer.

“That doesn’t help me. Who is he?”

“He’s our agent, gone bad,” admitted Types. She looked rather broken up about it. “Things got out of control and he took on a mind of his own.”

A few feels made themselves known, and I was unable to kick her while she was down with a snide comment. I said, “You mentioned that it was somepony I would never suspect?”

She opened her mouth to reply, but the train arrived in the Crystal Empire station just then. I groaned in anticipation of being turned sparkly, but to my delight the magic of the Empire seemed to have backed off to just making the locals look like walking discos.

We got off the train. It seemed like most of the crystal ponies were gathered around the castle for some kind of announcement. I heard Princess Cadance’s amplified voice in the distance. “The next host of the Equestria Games is the Crystal Empire!”

The crowd cheered and a wave of love and happiness washed over them all, soaking into the Crystal Heart, which occupied its pedestal beneath the castle. A bolt of energy lit up the whole building, but instead of bursting into a pretty light show or something, black smoke began waft through the air. The glow from the Crystal Heart changed to more sinister colors and kept getting brighter, becoming difficult to look at. I squinted, spotting a figure appear in the center of the light. An evil laugh echoed off all the buildings around the center of the city where the castle was located.

Beside me, Types looked horrified. I asked, “Is that some new evil thing?”

She shook her head. “No, a rather old one, I’m afraid. We’ve been trying to avoid a confrontation like this for a while.”

I started forward, opening my switchblade. It made a reassuring snick sound. Panzer pulled me back. “You can’t do that. As disturbingly effective as your methods usually are, they won’t work this time.”

“I know what you need to do,” said Types.

“And why should I take your advice on how to solve this problem?”

She stared at where the figure continued to cackle manically. “Because I created it.”