I had a goal, a big bold broad-sweeping goal, but there were a lot of little steps in between. Buffing up my lieutenants and getting that top-dog hierarchy reinforced was the first step.  The diamond dogs and the changelings already came with a ready-made hierarchy when I got them, which made things simpler. Black Fang ran a tight ship with the changelings, and Runt, Mange and Skank could at least thump skulls and keep the diamond dogs in line. Just to make things smoother I picked out a couple of thick necks in the pony ranks and made them officially head of the pony thugs. I didn't care much who was in charge at that level, actually-- if they gave me crap I'd bounce them and pick someone new. Besides, Second-in-Command was taken care of with Artful Dodger; after a couple more exhibitions of his new power-ups on some troublemakers, the rank and file were a lot more compliant.  Dodger told them I said to jump, they asked how high.

I decided it was time to buff up the mooks, too. I had to mull that one over a while. Weapons and armor were in short supply among the horde, and mostly consisted of diamond dog pickaxes and shovels.  Not good. Raiding or stealing weapons was sort of counter indicated too. Who would I steal them from? Celestia's troops were all cookie cutter, while I had earth ponies, pegasi, unicorns, changelings, and diamond dogs. I'd even picked up three or four minotaurs recently. Who knew what else I was going to have in the ranks eventually?  Mass producing our own was kind of out as well, for the same reason.

It sort of brought up questions for me. I got the gist of cutie marks and special talents and all that. How the heck did you make a uniform military out of such an individualistic, Special Snowflake society without losing all the benefits of their skills and talents? I thought about the performance record of Celestia's cookie-cutter soldiers. Answer: you didn't.  Individually they were impressive. As a uniform regimented force, they sucked. Whomped by Nightmare Moon, whomped by discord, whomped by the Changelings--- whomped by me...  Kind of ironic that a herd species would be so bad at working as a cohesive unit. They seemed to lose a dozen IQ points whenever they did. Then again, maybe that's why whoever made them gave them those pony tramp-stamps in the first place; to emphasize to them that they needed to be individuals and not just mindlessly run with the group. After all, herd instinct has some severe disadvantages--- like stampedes, and cliffs.

I decided to split the difference. Big Boss had been kind of indiscriminate in his hoarding; most of his hoard was gold and gems of course, but there was a buttload of copper, nickel and zinc coins too, and not a few things made of tin and the like because they were "shiny." I  put the blacksmiths to work melting it down, smelting it.  We had tons of wood dragged in from the Everfree; I put dogs and ponies who were any good with a knife to work whittling staves, bows, arrows, crude clubs and flails.  But mostly, they made... tools. Hammers, tongs, crude anvils, knives and hatchets and planes, metalworking tools, woodworking tools, stoneworking tools.  I had them dig outward, expanding the blacksmithing cave till it was the size of an airplane hangar, adding several stone furnaces and workbenches.  Then I threw open the doors and told my men "arm yourselves."

Every soldier was responsible for providing their own arms and armor, I told them. Whether they made it themselves with what I offered, or begged, borrowed, or bartered for it from one another, didn't matter to me-- whatever they did, it was what they were going to depend on for their very lives, so they'd better make the best of it.

The stockpile of weapons already in the armory went quickly. There was a lot of arguing and complaining, not to mention a lot of swearing  and fighting, but eventually under the rough tutelage of the diamond dogs they all set to with a will, making knives, swords, axes, hammers, crude armor and shields, winding cord for bowstring, fletching arrows and crossbow bolts, banging together shields and helmets out of wood and metal scrap. No two sets were alike and they were all crude; more than one had given up at making themselves some crude cudgels and  potmetal helmets. The ones with any knack for it soon had one hell of a barter system going in their favor, the diamond dog blacksmiths in particular earning some grudging respect from the ponies for their craftsmanship. But they were, at least, armed.

Of more interest to me was the fact that while we didn't have much iron to go around at the moment, we had copper, tin and zinc. And I knew the recipe for red brass...

Or at least I thought I did. It was something I'd picked up from a renfaire/civil war reenactor who did the blacksmithing thing, a couple years ago. I was 99.44 percent sure I had the ratios right,  so I went ahead and had a few things made. But I wasn't absolutely 100 percent sure I'd gotten it right until the day... well. THAT day.

It was the tail-end of winter. I had just overseen a duel of honor slash trial by combat between a diamond dog and an earth pony who'd been feuding over a sword, a particularly sweet piece of epic gear they'd found in Big Boss' hoard.  This sort of thing had been a problem for a while, as diamond dogs generally solved arguments with a physical brawl. Of course the ex-con ponies weren't as well versed in the diamond dog etiquette of beating someone's face in and knowing when to stop, so things had gotten out of hand. I'd kept the bloodshed to a minimum by  proclaiming that from now on, I was sitting in as referee. I'd had them lay out a fighting ring in the throne room, and then I'd laid down the law. I'd kept the ground rules simple: no weapons, no killing, and the two feuding parties had to agree ahead of time whether it was to first blood, first to yield, or last one standing.... and I could overrule on anything if the mood took me.  It had kept things controlled, if not civilized. It had the side benefit of giving the rest of the horde something to distract them from their cabin fever.

It was late afternoon. The two latest contestants on "the People's Court" were dragged from the ring, both bloody, bruised and unconscious.  The earth pony had definitely gotten the better of the diamond dog in the ring. He was going to be mad when he woke up and found out that I'd decided the diamond dog won the sword, though. (Come on-- the diamond dog had hands.) All of a sudden there was a commotion at the entrance to the throne room.  A couple of spear-wielding guards came rumbling in, surrounding a cloaked figure. That was interesting enough to get everyone's attention; all the bugs, 'dogs and ponies up in the galleries hollowed out of the cavern walls stopped arguing over their bets and leaned out to gawk.

Whoever he was, he had brass ones. He came clip-clopping up to my throne, slow and casual as you please, not even pausing at the bloodstains on the stone floor. At first I thought it was a pony under the cloak, but then he raised a long fingered hand from under the robes in a salute. I did my best not to show my surprise. A centaur? Well, why not? "Hail and well met, Darth Vulcan," he said in a reedy, whispery voice.

First the caravan ponies, then the ex-cons, now this guy. I was starting to get cheesed at the number of people who got waltzed into my lair unannounced. I gave him the full Dark Glowering Overlord routine. I sat back in my throne, Chrysalis on my right, Artful Dodger on my left, two burly minotaurs flanking the dais to my throne, my soldiers all around me with swords and clubs and spears at the ready.  "And who are you?" I growled at him, my mask lenses glowing red.

The centaur made a placating gesture. "Merely... an admirer," he said. He stepped closer; I could see a toothy grin and two dim red sparks under the hood of his cowl. "And a potential friend."

"And I should care?" I said.

The grin grew wider. "You are a being of great power, and I suspect even greater ambitions. But the forces aligned against you are not inconsiderable. You are in need of allies. I am an individual of considerable talents, and many centuries of experience dealing with the likes of the alicorn sisters. Together we could achieve much."

"Oy, an' does the 'individual' have a name?" Artful Dodger snarked.

Chrysalis was standing beside me in her biped form, leaning over my shoulder. I felt her tense up. Bad sign. He never took his eyes off me as he stepped up the dais to the throne. He flipped back his hood, revealing a goat-like, bearded head with two stubby horns. "You may call me Tirek."

That galvanized the two ponies next to me. Dodger yelped and scrambled backward like the devil himself had popped out of that cloak and said howdy-do. Chrysalis hissed like a snake. "Kill him you fools!" she shrieked at the guards. "Kill him before--"

Before what, she didn't get to say. Tirek waved his hand and both she and Dodger went flying into the wall behind us. They fell to the floor, doubled over. That was my cue; I started pulling up a fistful of balefire to blast him. He lunged forward and grabbed me by the collar of my gorget, pulling me forward till we were almost nose-to-mask. The amulet objected to that, sparking and zapping. "Yess," he hissed. "The alicorn amulet IS bonded to you. As if that mattered to me. I want power--- and you have it for the taking."

He opened his mouth and there was this whooshing noise like air being sucked down a wind tunnel. Purple-green-black energy began pouring out of me and into his mouth in a vortex. I heard a scream; a lime-green bolt of Changeling magic shot past my head at Tirek, only to swirl down the vortex in his mouth like a lime jell-o shot. A jet of Dodger's nightmare-smoke met the same fate. He swelled and grew, muscles bulging on his skinny arms and rippling across his chest, horns lengthening. Energy poured out of me....It felt like he was trying to suck my brain out through my eyeballs. I felt my limbs turn to noodles; the room started going black.

So I pulled out my gun and shot him in the face.

To review, I was a cosplayer. So I'd picked up a lot of odd skills here and there. One of the things I'd learned about was historically accurate firearms. Did you know that most guns back in the day weren't made of iron? No, they were made of an alloy of copper, tin and zinc called "red brass"... or, alternatively, gunmetal. I'd never had the chance to try my hand at it, but I knew the ratios for smelting, and when I saw how much copper, tin and zinc were in Big Boss's hoard, I'd commissioned one of my diamond dog blacksmiths with a little private project.

The results weren't anything spectacular. It was really crude-- a twin-barreled, smooth bore flintlock about the size of a hog-leg shotgun, with barrels thick around as my thumb and loaded with lead ball.  I'd kept it loaded and strapped to my shin since the day it had been finished. The moment I felt my knees giving, I reached down, pulled the hogleg out of its holster and shot him right between the eyes with both barrels.

The look on his face when those two enormous boreholes raised to his face was timeless.

There was a thunderous roar and the goat-centaur went flying backwards off the dais like he had wings. He hit the floor with a wet crunchy thud, dead as a stone. A half-second later the two minotaurs were on him, pointlessly pounding the dead body with their warhammers like they were playing the carol of the bells.

"Enough, you idiots!" I heard Chrysalis spit at them. I felt her pick me up off the floor. Wow, I hadn't even realized I'd fallen over. She and Dodger helped me back into my throne, cosseting and fussing. "Are you well, my lord?" "You okay, boss?" I nodded. Doggone, they actually looked concerned. I might have even thought they weren't faking.

I clung limply to the arms of my throne and looked down at the body. He had swollen up considerably, I assumed from the magic he'd sucked out of me. His chest had grown broad as a barrel, his arms thick and muscled. Now his battered corpse was deflating back to his original like an untied party balloon. Streams of magic leaked out of him, swirling around and racing away to who-knows-where before fading away. More than a fair share of it spiraled back into my own body, strengthening me. I took a shuddering breath and sat up. "Take that away and burn it," I snarled, pointing at the corpse. "And dump the ashes someplace disgusting." A couple of diamond dogs wrapped the bloody mess in his own robe and dragged him out.

I reholstered my smoking hogleg gun and sagged back in my throne. "All right," I said. "Who the flying @$#^$ was that?"

It took a short while for them to refresh my memory. I was less than thrilled with the revelation.

My lieutenants and I had a closed-room meeting shortly after sunset that day. I spent a few good minutes chewing them all out for being so freaking stupid as to let some stranger into the Lair like that. They  all protested that he'd been inside before anyone had known he was there. "Then he should have been skewered before he got to the throne room!" I snarled. I was only partially mollified when I found out how he'd gained entrance; the on duty guards turned up, weak and shaky, reporting that they'd run into some strange figure in a cloak right before things had suddenly gone dark... I gave orders to collapse the entrance tunnels and dig new ones elsewhere, in the hopes of throwing anyone else off the track.

"This only underlines the problem," I growled, pacing back and forth in the war room. "Shoot, it's one of the laws of power."

"The laws of power?" Chrysalis said.

"There's a list back on earth on the internet called 'the 48 laws of Power,' " I said. "There are other lists: the Overlord's list, the Genre Savvy Guide, the Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries..." I waved it off. " Anyway. Rules of power. One of the rules is 'do not build a fortress to protect yourself. Isolation is dangerous.' "

One of my lieutenants looked skeptical. "so you're supposed to wander around without any defenses at all?"

"What the law means," I said with exaggerated patience, "is that putting yourself up on a hill and surrounding yourself with walls and moats just means that everyone knows where you are, while you only know what you can see from your tower window." I gestured in a random direction, presumably in the direction of Canterlot. "Look at the Pretty Pony Princesses. They sit up in that palace atop a mountain--"

"Or down in the lake below it," Dodger sniggered.

"--and they got no clue what's running loose in the rest of their kingdom," I finished. I nodded at Dodger. "or even in the streets of their own city. Meanwhile every villain with an axe to grind knows right where to find them, every day of the week." I tipped my head at Chrysalis. Brawn mulled that over.

"So Celestia and her sister should be traveling around Equestria in a caravan, perhaps?" Chrysalis said dryly.

"Or she should have more than one palace that she can be at, and a way to  travel rapidly between each," I said. "And a constant network of communication between all of them-- something faster than pegasus mailmen and magic scrolls." My answer seemed to surprise her.

"And which rule was that trick with the pocket sized cannon under your cloak?" Dodger persisted.

I regarded him irritably. "Evil Overlord rule #4: Shooting is NOT too good for my enemies." He shut up. I continued. "We're hidden here, but we're vulnerable. Celestia knows we're here; hell, everybody knows we're here. The only reason she hasn't sent in the army to root us out-- or dropped a solar flare on our heads--" they all looked up at the ceiling and cringed. "--is because it's too inconvenient right now. But it won't always be."

"So what is your plan?" Black Fang said.

I rolled out a map of the Everfree on the table, and a map of Equestria next to it. "Eventually we're getting out of this dump of a forest entirely," I said. "But for now, we're going to spread out a little more. We're too small a group to scatter all over the place, but we can have fallback points... other lairs to move or retreat to. I've already got the tunnelers on their way, digging out locations here, here, here and here." I put stones on the map in the locations I indicated. "They'll also be digging out smaller bolt-holes and storage caches all around. We'll be stocking those with food, weapons, and staples for emergencies."

"How will we find them?" Dodger said. "We can't exactly all carry maps around..."

"The diamond dogs will mark some by scent," I said. "The changelings will mark others with changeling pheromones. A few others will be marked by unicorns using invisible runes, and so forth. No one person or group will know where all of the caches are, no one group will know where all the fallback bases are, either. Except me." I swept the stones off the map. It made no difference to me; I had a copy of the map magically stored in my own brain.  

"The second half of this: we need eyes and ears... and hands-- hooves, claws, whatever--- outside the Everfree. I want to know what Canterlot is planning and doing. I'd sure as hell like to know ahead of time for once when one of Princess Cake Butt's canned evils has popped its seal and is about to land in my living room." Chrysalis snorted at that one. "I want spies and insiders in Canterlot, in Ponyville, in every major city and town in Equestria eventually.  Sunbutt and Moonbutt cut a fart, I want to know it before she even has a chance to say 'excuse me.' "

"That will be... difficult," Black Fang said, hesitantly. "We once had changeling infiltrators all over Canterlot... before the fiasco at the Royal Wedding." He gave Chrysalis a pointed look. She hissed at him. "But the magic wave purged us all from the city, and they have instituted detection spells that would expose us immediately now."

"And Sparklebutt's wards won't let my Eyes anywhere near Canterlot or Ponyville," I agreed. "We can't exactly send in diamond dog spies, and all our ponies have their faces plastered on wanted posters all over Equestria." I paused. "We need people. Spies, infiltrators, inside men. "

"A treacherous duke or baron?" Chrysalis ventured.

I snorted. "Not even. She'll be watching that lot like a hawk. No. We need... little people." I looked over at my street rat. "Low caste ponies. The nobodies. The people hanging from the bottom rung of respectable society. Ones she or her nobles or her guards have overlooked or undervalued or carelessly stepped on without even noticing. She's a queen; she's bound to have thousands of ponies who have been neglected or mistreated by her government or even by herself. Probably the very same ponies who sort her mail, make her bed, or pour her morning coffee. Forget the Captain of the Guard, give me the minimum wage schmuck who's in charge of raising the portcullis and I'll take the castle." I saw understanding flit across their faces; there was a gleam of admiration, especially, in Chrysalis' eyes.

"So how do we find these ponies?" Brawn said.

"There are ways," I said, trying to sound mysterious and foreboding. "We'll start by talking with our own. There are bound to be ponies here with friends and family and contacts on the inside. But if we play our cards right... we won't have to look hard. They'll come to us."