"In all of your actions thus far," Celestia said, "I am yet to discern any sort of plan."

It was lunchtime. Well, I supposed it was lunchtime; Celestia's guards had led me by my chains to a privy at the end of the hall, let me tend to my business, then brought me back to my cell, where they had handed me a bowl with cornbread and beans. I had been allowed to sit on the floor, my chains fastened to the bars so that I could eat, and Celestia had continued her interrogation.

I looked up at her with a mouthful of cornbread, chewed, swallowed and answered. "Do I look like a guy with a plan?"

Celestia sniffed. "A goal, then. What was your intent? To conquer and rule here? To return to your home with the Alicorn Amulet and rule there, instead?"

I snorted. I could just see myself trying to conquer my world with a magic medallion and a bunch of diamond dogs. The power-grubbing bum-wipes running the world would call a drone strike in on my skinny black-clad butt before you could say oligarchy.  Then again, the thought of ruling an empire here... in a world where the technological level seemed to be set to "whatever", the laws of nature and physics were apparently running a reelection campaign against the laws of magic, and everything apparently ran on the logic of a six year old girl... "You want to know the truth, Princess?" I said, wiping my mouth on my sleeve. "I really got only one issue. Getting out of here. After that?" I shrugged. "I'd make my mind up then."

"And the amulet didn't tell you?" Celestia asked, condescending.

"Nope." I took another spoonful of beans. "It wasn't like I unlocked the secrets of the universe, just the user's Help manual. Knowing how to ride a bike doesn't turn you into an X-treem sports rider overnight." This of course went right over her pointy rainbow-wigged head. She gave me a cockeyed look, like I was talking in japanese.  "I got the basics," I said, trying to dumb it down a little. "Magic Kindergarten in a box. With maybe an encyclopedia set as a graduation gift." That seemed to clarify things for her. "Besides, it's not like reading a spell book is going to tell you who cast the spell on you."

"Of course, I was sort of limited in what I could do. I was kind of busy fortifying my base. Fall was almost over and Winter was coming fast..."

Everybody in the lair was busting a hump. The dogs had been antsy as heck, digging tunnels everywhere, dragging in food from the forest, nagging me every five minutes about getting ready for winter. This was annoying, seeing as I had other things on my to-do list than to play frontier settlers with a bunch of orc-dogs. First off, I was busy trying to fortify our location against attack by angry magical ponies, and second off, trying to organize a plan to find out who or what had sent me to this world in the first place.  

That second one took a pretty high precedent, actually. I'd been dragged into another universe without my permission, and had the door slammed shut and locked behind me. I didn't like that. If I'm going to go anywhere or be anywhere, it's gonna be MY choice, MY decision. I had one goal; find out how I got here, learn how to get back and then kick the @#$$ of whoever was responsible.

Still, I wasn't going to get anything done if the help was too busy pitching a hissy about how the larder wasn't deep enough or there wasn't enough logs to throw on the fire. I set most of the diamond dogs to the work of hunting, fishing, foraging, and trapping to bulk up the food supplies. I put Big Mama in charge of drying and smoking and storing the food the others brought in. I took a few minutes, leveled an acre or two of trees, and set dogs to chopping them up for firewood. I even had my dark timberwolves going out, dragging home squirrels and rabbits and other small critters. All else considered, at least nobody would starve.

Or I might choke a B@#$% if I didn't get the D@#$d toilet working.

"Okay, now turn it on!"

Of all the things in the lair, this was the oddest. Back when Big Boss was still in charge, they'd hit a convoy carrying a ton of plumbing supplies headed to some royal something or other's manor. They'd bagged about a ton of plumbing pipe, some random fixtures and-- of all things-- a ceramic toilet, which had miraculously survived the trip home and was now sitting proudly in my private chambers.

"Okay, the seals are holding--"

I'd used it as a water bowl a couple of times for the Royal Brat when I had to be away from the lair for the day (hey, it was clean, and it held tons more water than any other bowls we had. Plus it taught her not to whine about her water bowl being empty.) But once our big Ponyville Raid went off without a hitch, I decided to take the bull by the horns and add some creature comforts to my life. Thanks to those D@#$d ponies, their magic portals and their Alicorn Amulet I was living without TV, internet, electricity, cell phone access, fast food, modern medicine, or even reliably clean clothes, but I was not going to go another day without indoor plumbing.

*creaak* "oh that's not good"

My dad and I had spent a summer installing a septic system in an old log cabin, so I had the basics down. Of course, this time around I was having to work with cobbled-together materials and makeshift tools. (diamond dogs have forges, but lead and copper plumbing fixtures are a little beyond their skillset.)  I'd managed to bang together a workable septic tank and blackwater drain pipe, and I redirected one of the underground streams into a little gravity-powered reservoir for water supply.  Getting the stolen valves, pipes, etc. to cooperate was another matter, however.

*bang* "WAUGH, TURN IT OFF, TURN IT OFF!!"

Runt didn't turn it off. Not surprising he didn't hear me over the roar of water spraying everywhere in my half-finished bath house.  The intake valve on the toilet had blown off under the incoming pressure. Skank, Mange and I found ourselves flailing about as we received a high-pressure hosing down with freezing cold water. Ah, the glamorous life of the Evil Overlord.

And why was I, the Evil Overlord, trying to assemble my own plumbing? I submit for your consideration the kind of help available. My two assistants, Mange and Skank, were less than zero help. They were too busy splashing about in the torrential spray, ki-yi'ing and waving their arms like lunatics. "Pffaugh, stop the water, stop the water!" I yelled, trying to shield my face. No, the helmet was not watertight. Skank lunged forward and tried to stop the flow with his bare hands, only managing to redirect the spray into his own face. He stood there holding the pipe going "Whaaaarrgharble" as he was force-fed about a gallon of water a minute.

"Quit drinking it and plug it!" I yelled.

Mange finally showed some presence of mind and grabbed a hammer, smashing the end of the pipe flat and cutting off the flow. I stuck my head out the bathroom door and bellowed for Runt to shut off the water. Mercifully, the flow finally ceased.

We all stood there, dripping, as I contemplated things. The pipes were smashed (again), the bathroom was drenched (again) and already the humid heat of the furnaces was making the cave smell like wet dog hair. I decided it was time for a change of venue.

"....So," I said. "You were saying something about a ruined castle in the middle of the forest?"

I'd managed to glean a little information from my shoddy library and my dimwitted soldiers. It was an ancient ruin, apparently; the ancient Castle of the Pony Sisters, a crumbling palace half-demolished and abandoned over a thousand years ago. So naturally, this being Stupid Pony Fairyland, when we arrived there I discovered it looked like it had been left abandoned maybe a year, if that.

Seriously, this floored me. I just stood in the entryway for a while and stared. I've seen thousand-year-old ruins before. They're usually little more than a few crumbling walls of stone, covered in vines and moss. Especially in a temperate forest like this. But this... I could see suits of armor lining the hallways. Suits of armor should have been nothing but piles of rust within a decade, what with those holes in the roof. There were rotting carpets on the floor and tapestries that should have been nothing more than topsoil centuries ago. There were paintings on the wall, just ordinary canvas and paint, fully exposed to the rain and sun--- what wouldn't have been washed away in the rain should have been bleached colorless by the sun. Oh there were vines here and there growing through the broken windows and some cobwebs and stuff, but I wasn't fooled.

"@@#% it, magic,"  I muttered, and shrugged.

This had, of course, become my fallback explanation for everything when I was confronted with the bat-poo space-monkey insanity that is Ponyworld. "@@#% it, magic."  Talking ponies? @@#% it, magic. Piles of kindling that think they're wolves? @#%$% it, magic. Houses made of clouds? Liquid rainbows? Sun and Moon setting in the wrong d@#n direction again? @$%^@% it, magic. I was starting to understand why most of Earth's pagan civilizations had never crawled their way up out of the bronze age. How could you make sense of the world if you even thought it actually worked like this?

What made my new default answer for Life, the Universe and Everything really irritating was that, around here, it was usually right. I didn't even have to scry for it; the place was obviously under a few gazillion layers of preserving spells, keeping it and everything inside it from decaying.

Ironically that just meant it made less sense. Who would put that much magical preservation on a building and everything in it, just to-- abandon it all? And WHY? Damaged or not it was such a criminally obscene waste! The suits of armor alone... do you realize how much a full suit of armor cost in the dark ages? They would ransom those things after a battle. And the tapestries? The royalty that lived there probably squeezed the blood-money out of a dozen peasants just to pay for one of them. Furniture, paintings, weapons and shields... I didn't know whether I hoped to find any books here or not; I mean, good night, in the medieval period books were written by hand and cost a precious fortune, I can't imagine what kind of ruler, no matter how depraved and irresponsible and decadent would just leave all this stuff sitting out in the wilderness to...

Celestia coughed.

I stared at her. "You?"

"My sister and I, yes."

"You were the Royal Pony Sis---" Several things clicked all at once. "Sun, Moon, Nightmare Moon..." I pointed at her with my manacled hand. "You had that fight with your sister, trashed the place, banished her to the Moon, and then you-- you just ABANDONED IT??"

She said nothing.

"All that art. All those suits of armor, and gilded furniture, and tapestries, and all those millions of bits in priceless books and art and--- " I clutched at the air. "Millions of hours of peasant labor, all the blood and sweat and tears of your subjects who probably bled through the hooves just making that crap for you or were squeezed penniless to pay the taxes for it and you-- you just left it all out in the wilderness to ROT??"

"The Castle had to be abandoned in haste," Celestia said. "The magic we unleashed that day had set the Everfree forest running riot. There was only time to reinforce the preserving spells on the castle and its contents. We could not go back for any of the castle's many treasures."

"FOR A THOUSAND YEARS??--- You know what, forget it," I said sarcastically, flipping my hands up at the wrist (I had been reattached to the wall.) "It's about par for the course around here. This whole place is run like Clown College. You're thousands of years old and you are absolutely incompetent--"

"Mind your tongue around the Princess, scum," one of the guards barked.

Armor or not, it's hard to be intimidated by something that looks like a plush carnival fairway prize. "Or what?" I sneered at him. "You'll chain me up and throw me in a dungeon?" I shot a look at the Princess. "Or I dunno, stick me in a box for a thousand years and then leave it up to six unarmed fillies to save the day when I inevitably escape? Ooo, how about throwing me in Tartarus where the only guard can be distracted with a rubber ball and a dog biscuit? "

Her face was flaming red at this point. I decided to push it. "Or you could treat me like you do your average magical MacGuffin--" I glanced down at the Alicorn Amulet and smirked. "Just drop it someplace random, rub a four leaf clover and hope nobody nasty finds it. You're supposed to be this wise all-knowing leader with thousands of years of experience, but I've seen people dispose of  busted lightbulbs with more care than you show for world-shattering magical artifacts."

She was shifting from red to purple. I shrugged. "Oh, I forgot. This is about VILLAINS. Your protocol for dealing with those is to mistake them for your niece, give them free run of your palace for days on end, ignore all the warnings you get from your most trusted advisor, and then marry them off to your Captain of the Guard..." I let the pause drop. "So yeah. Incompetent." She kept staring, I misinterpreted. "Yeah, I read newspapers. You'd be amazed at the litter that gets dumped at the edge of the Everfree..."

She stared at me in utter amazement. "Why do you say such things when you know that I could have you executed for it?" she marveled.

"Well, here we are," I said, cool as I could manage. "I'm your prisoner. I'm in chains. I'm completely in your power." I lowered my head as if for an executioner's axe. "Take your best shot."

We all stood still. She didn't even lower her horn. "You know I won't," she said, calm again.

"Course not. You wouldn't even frag that prick Sombra, and he was like a little four-hooved Hitler. Heck, you even had Discord dead to rights; five minutes with a sledgehammer and you would have gotten rid of your chaos problem permanently. Don't make a bluff you won't call. "

She shuddered. "We do not simply destroy everything that troubles us," she said scornfully.

"Yeah. And you don't keep track of all your little toys either. And it keeps coming around to bite you in your sun-dappled butt, don't it."

I'm sure anyone would want to know what I got up to in that castle. Not much, at first. Me and a dozen diamond dogs stood there in the entryway with a few snow flurries blowing in behind us, looking around, not daring to go further inside. It smelled like a trap. A magically preserved, unguarded castle in the middle of a forest? Yeah, that was what made sense to me. We'd brought crystal torches from the caves to light our way; the light reached far enough that we could see our way around. "Spread out," I told the others. "Everyone, divide up into groups of two or three. Look for the usual; tools, weapons, books--" I paused. "Maybe plumbing fixtures if they have them." Would thousand year old castles have plumbing? Why not, it made as much sense as anything else here.

"But don't touch anything. Just remember where it is, come and fetch me to look at it first. And be careful...." at that moment Runt decided to venture out ahead of the group. There was a squeal of old hinges and an entire section of floor flipped end over end. With a "Yeep" the mangy yellow dog disappeared, the floor folding back in place over top of him.

"...There could be traps," I finished. I sighed and walked over to stand next to the trapdoor. I could see the blue-green light of Runt's torch shining up through the cracks around the edge. "Runt?"

"Yes?" came the muffled reply

"Are you injured?"

"Don't think so..."

"Don't think so?"

"Can't see, Dread Master," Runt's voice quavered. "Can't see! Everything dark!"

I held onto my patience. "Runt?"

"Yes?"

"Try opening your eyes."

There was a pause. "Oh. That better."

I found a loose floorboard and pressed. The section of floor flipped over again and a wide-eyed Runt reappeared, clutching his glow-torch in both hands. "As I was saying," I continued. "Don't touch anything. Stay in groups of three. If you find anything, come to me and show me where it is. Got that?" A few sing-song repetitions, and I was sure they had it. Runt, Skank and I headed off, leaving the others to explore on their own. We all scattered, eyes peeled and scrying pendants in hand.

I suppose the results were predictable. After about a good hour and, my count, thirteen different booby traps, I finally had enough of playing Scooby Dooby Doors and started making my way through the castle a little more forcefully. That is to say, I started using my magic to add some superfluous new open doorways to the preexisting walls in my immediate path.

You know, it wasn't so much that I was losing my temper anymore as I was just not reining it back in the first place. I certainly had the Diamond Dogs intimidated; Skank and Runt were trailing behind me, wide-eyed, as I blasted and/or disintegrated my way into and out of tunnels, traps, and oubliettes, swearing up a torrent as I did it.

"All this--" explosion "--crap I have to deal with--" detonation-- " 'I say, Princess Sparkle McFluffypoo, we have a small mountain of weapons and magic tomes and super-special ancient artifacts---" disintegrate "-- perhaps we should lock them up in a vault someplace safe?" fireball "Why no, don't be ridiculous! Let's take them and--" bigger explosion "--- stick them in a collapsing condemned building--" eruption "-- out in the middle of a wilderness--" defenestration "-- and fill it full of booby traps!"

I had no clue what the other groups were finding, but thus far the yield had been pretty pitiful. The armor was all pony-shaped, so it was doubtful the dogs could use any of it. Then again, My inner cosplayer was just unable to let genuine, honest-to-crapmonkeys plate armor just lie there and rust... plus, I rationalized, I might get some pony minions sometime in the future... I made a mental note to have the dogs drag it all off, anyway.

The weapons might be more useful. Just looking at them sort've made my brain call a brief halt, though. How did something with no hands use a sword or a spear? I pushed the thought aside. If I pondered that too much and then I'd start wondering about ponies using doorknobs and hammers and spoons and I'd end up staring at a wall trying to make sense of it all.

"Minotaurs."

"What?"

"Most of our consumer goods come from minotaur manufacturers. There are a surprising number of races in the world with paws like yours.... Ponies are something of a niche market though so it's hard to find merchandise that's made expressly for hooves."

I blinked. "That's both surprisingly sensible and vaguely disappointing."

It was when I found a spiral stairwell down into the basement that things started to get interesting. We were about halfway down when the scrying crystal I'd made-- a crude thing from a book of grade school projects; it lit up in the presence of powerful magic-- started to glow. We reached the bottom floor, a dungeon of some sort, and brief scouting around made it clear that the crystal was glowing in response to something even further down, beneath the stone foundation of the castle itself.

I paced around the dungeon floor, tracing out where the light waxed and waned. Yes, definitely something directly below... my breakthrough came when I found a small, black vine, gnarled and thorny, growing up through a hairline crack in the floor. Magic was seeping and sputtering up through the crevice. Success! The vine must be growing in a chamber buried below the castle, I thought.

"Runt, Mange, fetch the others, tell them to bring digging tools-- no wait!" They stopped in mid stride while I thought it over. The vine had already dug its way up to us through the stones. Why go to the trouble of digging down when the vine could do the work for us? I reached out with my magic to the vine and touched it.

Yeah, you can guess how well this went. I was planning on using my magic to sort of feel my way down the vine, then excavate a tunnel around it. The vine had other ideas. The instant my magic touched it, the vine went berserk, shooting out in every direction, burrowing through stone and mortar at way too scary speeds. The vines swelled from as thick as my pinky to as big around as my thigh, splitting the floor into jagged boulders and crushing them like chalk.

I had just enough time to say "oh crap" before we all fell through the floor.

We fell I don't know how far. A two count, maybe a three count. Then I was bouncing off rocks, rocks bouncing off me, me bouncing off of screaming diamond dogs... then bang, landed on the ground again, rocks and rubble and yes, diamond dogs raining down around me.

The rumble of falling rubble finally quit. I lay there for a minute, savoring the pain.. My body eventually stopped screaming "I HATE YOU" long enough for me to do a quick self-survey; miraculously nothing seemed broken, although everything seemed to be bruised... Thank God for my armor. Thank God I had magically upgraded that armor from rubber and PVC to actual metal. As it was there wasn't a single piece of armor on me that wasn't dented all to hell.

I sat up, groaning. My dogs were already getting to their own feet, moaning and limping. Diamond dogs are darned sturdy. We had been very very fortunate; boulders large enough to smash our arms and legs into toothpaste tubes had landed an arm's length away from us. I made a point of limping a ways away from the hole in the ceiling before assessing where we were.

We were at the shallow end of a large, egg shaped cavern.  The walls and the ceiling, except for where we fell through it, were covered in enormous crystals that glowed in pale blues and lavenders. A couple of tunnels connected to it trailed off into the dark. The floor was layered in little steppes, almost like the Giant's Causeway in Ireland. Circular little columns and platforms of stone. They were dotted with moss and other plants that grew in the pale light. And at the center of it all, on the opposite side of the chamber, stood a...

...A crystal tree. It was...

I've never seen anything like it. It was beautiful, with faceted limbs like the branches of a snowflake, and glowing blooms that dangled on fronds like a weeping willow. It was alive, too. I could tell.The whole chamber throbbed with power, and all of it emanating from that tree.  I could feel it buzzing in my dental fillings. This made every other bit of magic in Equestria look like a wet firecracker in comparison.

"Gentlemen," I said. "Let's get the hell out of here. NOW."

Celestia looked at me. "You left?" she said.

"Not immediately," I said. "I tore up all those vines down there. Took some fiddling but I managed to find a spell that burned them to ash, clear down to the root. Good thing I did; they were everywhere, and all of them seemed to be growing towards the tree. I'm no gardener but I know a weed when I see one and those things were the nastiest weeds I ever saw."

"That's all you did?" Celestia said. "You swear it." She seemed awfully demanding.

I snorted. "I'm not stupid, Celestia," I said. "I knew that tree was something I shouldn't mess with the moment I clapped eyes on it." That was no exaggeration. The moment I'd stepped close to it I'd suddenly felt like Yosemite Sam the moment he strikes a match and realizes he's tunneled up into a warehouse full of gunpowder. "You ever been out to the desert in Utah? ... eh well no you wouldn't have. But, anyway... the desert. You go out far enough in some deserts, you'll find these balancing rocks. Huge rock formations, boulders as big as houses that have been there since the dawn of time. And the wind, and the rain, and what all else has worn the ground away around them. They've had the ground eroded out from under them till they're sitting there, balancing on a teeny little pillar of stone only a few feet around, some of 'em hundreds of feet in the air. You ever seen that?"

"I know the phenomenon, yes," Celestia said.

"Well I've seen those things too. I've stood there with a million pounds of stone hanging overhead, casting a shadow over me, a whole mountain just sitting there waiting for someone to come along and give it a good solid push and send it crashing down. It's almost like you can just feel all that weight, all that force, just hanging suspended overhead.

"I felt just like that when I stood near that tree. I felt like one solid push and, I dunno, the Moon and the Sun could fall out of the sky." I felt a shiver go down my back. "That tree is one of the fulcrums of the world. I'd sooner stick my tongue in an electric socket than mess around with it."

We left the way we had entered.  I burned out the vines, and sealed up that tunnel good and tight, fusing the rocks together with my magic behind us. Heck, I went so far as to block the other passages leading out of the cavern with stalactites. If I wasn't going to mess with it, I didn't want some spelunking bumtwaddle to come galumphing in and start messing with it either. I had to resist the urge to try and whip up some magical gate-guardians or something, too. No telling what a golem might get up to while I was away; the last thing the world needed was for some giant rock statue to trip over its feet and smash the very thing it was protecting.

Once we were back inside the castle proper, I learned that by that point several of the dogs had found the royal library.   I had them load up on as many books as they could carry, and we skedaddled, with full plans to return the next day in force and strip the place to the walls. And maybe plant, I dunno, a colony of timberwolves on top of the mess to keep nosy nellies out.

I grinned to myself. I'm sure she could hear the humor in my voice. "Of course, those plans got sort of interrupted..." I said, giving my chains a meaningful jingle.

"When I came back the next day-- and three different armies fell out of the skies on me."